Soul of a Sandwich

When it comes to listing great sandwiches, the country of Uruguay is not often considered. This is perhaps justified by the fact that the United States, grand-masters and innovators of the sandwich making tradition, have so fervently embraced and diversified the field that there often seems little room for competition. Indeed, amongst such favourites as the Grinder and the Hogie in the Midwest, pulled pork sandwiches in the South, hot pastrami on rye in the East and countless specialty designs in every roadside diner from sea to shining sea, what country could possibly compete with the near culinary monopoly that the U.S. holds over the art of putting food stuffs between two pieces of bread?

Uruguay is a place that, as a friend recently pointed out: “you have probably heard of, but can’t point to on a map”. It is a small country squeezed into the South-Eastern corner of South America between regional giants Brazil and Argentina. Its 3 million inhabitants of mostly European decent don’t get into the international news much. They don’t suffer through hurricanes and earthquakes, don’t produce narcotics and haven’t staged many revolutions in the past 50 years. They are a low-key people living in a low-key place, and that is the way that many Uruguayans like it. Another thing that many Uruguayans like is meat, in fact they love it, and they have proved this love by creating one of the best sandwiches in you have never heard of – the Chivito.
If you believe the old bit of bumper-sticker morality that “meat is murder,” the Chivito is barnyard genocide. Its most basic permutation consists of three types of meat – steak tenderloin, ham and pancetta – grilled together on a hot plate, topped with hard boiled or fried egg, lettuce, tomato, and melted mozzarella, and sandwiched between a large white roll. The ingredients can be expanded to include relishes like olives, peppers and mushrooms as well as an encyclopaedic list of sauces from perennial favourites like mayonnaise and thousand island dressing, to spicy, green chimichurri.
One of the only meats not present is the “chivito” or “young goat” for which the sandwich is named. Instead, the name pays homage to the story of the sandwich’s invention one dark and stormy night during the early 1940’s in the resort town of Punta Del Este. It was there, in a small restaurant called El Mejillon, owned and operated by Antonio Carbonaro, that the sandwich was first thrown together on a whim.
“It had been a tough night,” Antonio said in an interview before his death in 2003 “There had been a black out. A woman arrived who was from Northern Argentina or Chile and she asked to be served baby goat because she had eaten it in Córdoba before coming to Uruguay. Since we didn’t have goat, we made her a sandwich with toasted bread, a slice of ham and a juicy cut of steak. She loved it and without meaning to, we invented the Chivito.”.
All in all, the sandwich takes no longer than ten minutes to assemble, but calling it “fast food” would be a disservice to the quality of the ingredients – especially the meat. Most of the beef in Uruguay comes from ranches located in the vast, fertile plains in the interior of the country. These are lands where the last of the Gauchos (South American cowboys) still roam on horseback through undulating seas of green interrupted only by the occasional farmhouse or gnarled Ombú tree. These are also the lands where, every year, Uruguayans produce 600,000 tons of beef, 450,000 of which are exported to 80 different countries. That means each Uruguayan is still eating 53 kilos worth of steaks, ribs, hamburgers, tongues, roasts, tripe, hooves, flanks and tails every year.
“Beef is part of our pop culture,” Explained Pablo Atúnez, a food columnist for Montevideo’s largest paper El País as we gorged ourselves on Chivitos and French fries in La Pasiva – one of the city’s most emblematic restaurants for the dish. “I would say 95 percent of our national dishes are based around red meat, and that is only because I’m leaving room for error,” he added, daubing an errant smear of mayonnaise from his cheek.
As a matter of national pride, Uruguayans don’t eat low-grade meat, or at least don’t admit to it. Given its quasi-sacred status in the national cuisine, doing so would seem almost perverse. “Our meat starts at grade ‘A’ and gets better,” boasted my friend, Rafael Rey who also works as a journalist in Montevideo. Exaggerations aside, it is rare to find someone making Chivitos who doesn’t swear by the quality of their cow. The tenderloin is almost always a medallion of the highest grade Uruguayan free range, exclusively grass grazed beef pounded almost paper thin to ensure tenderness. The ham, pancetta and eggs come from domestic distributors with similarly exacting quality controls. All the vegetables are both locally sourced and exceedingly fresh. Even the buns are freshly baked in local bakeries.
The other factor setting the Chivito apart from run of the mill fast food is the precision and attention to detail with which the sandwiches are made. When it comes to putting the monster together, there are three important rules, explained Marcelo Peralta, and they start with the tomato always going below the meat. Marcelo is the general manager of Chiviteria Marcos and the son of its founder for whom the chain is named. He has been working in his father’s restaurants since he could carry a tray and talks about the Chivito as if it were a member of his family. Even given his expertise, such an inversion of the stacking hierarchy seems counterintuitive to most people from the Northern hemisphere. It brings to mind a famous map sketched by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torrez García that shows North and South America inverted so that Tierra del Fuego approaches the North Pole and Canada Dominates the Southern oceans . His was a political statement, but in the case of the Chivito, it is a matter of tradition and functionality. If the tomato goes on top of the meat, it is prone to slide off which then threatens the stability of the whole sandwich. Rule number two is that, after adding ham, pancetta and relish, everything is topped with thin slices of mozzarella and run through the broiler thereby “sealing” the ingredients into place, as Marcelo put it. Finally the bread, referred to locally as “Australian bread” is neither as soft as a common white roll nor as crusty as a baguette. Instead, it is the perfect consistency to hold all the ingredients together without stressing them when bitten into. All of this delicate construction gives life to that rarest of dishes – a gigantic sandwich that doesn’t fall apart. Of course, structural integrity also depends on a fourth, supplementary rule stating that you have to eat the thing with your hands. As Marcelo told me, this is the only rule they don’t enforce, offering silverware at the counter, but there was no mistaking in the look on his face regarding the general opinion of those who dine on Chivitos using knife and fork.
Eating it with your hands, the quality of the ingredients and the order in which they are placed are all traditions that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with the taste or general appearance of the sandwich. However, they remain integral to the concept of the Chivito. “You can eat a steak sandwich with cheese and lettuce and tomato, but a Chivito is something entirely different,” Explained Rafael. “If you try to change it too much, it loses its essence.”
This “essence” is something that exists in all emblematic dishes from fish and chips in Great Britain to paella in Spain, to the much-loved American hamburger. It is a combination of the cultural and the culinary and it imbues each dish with a sort of life, making it more than the sum of its parts. The composition of the Chivito can and often does change slightly from restaurant to restaurant but the most popular locales for eating the sandwich – places like Chiviteria Marcos, la Pasiva and Chiviteria Fergus – are neither the most-high end nor the most innovative. Instead, they are the restaurants that capture the intangible essence of the sandwich through a vague alchemy of pragmatism and propaganda, affordability and ambience. Like the all-night diner in which the sandwich was born, the best modern-day Chiviterias are no frills establishments with napkin dispensers on the tables and old TV’s in the corner set on a constant loop of soccer games and telenovelas (latin soap-operas). The beer is usually domestic and only comes in liter bottles to be shared between friends. The service is invariably warm and inviting, radiating a certain small town friendliness that is distinctly Uruguayan, feeling neither forced nor self-conscious. These are the diners that ensure that eating a Chivito isn’t simply gorging yourself on more meat than is medically recommended, it is tasting a culture – consuming an ideal produced by countless generations of friendly, low-key, meat loving Uruguayans.
The soul of any dish is not an easy thing to grasp completely or understand wholly. However, it is safe to say that at least part of the Alma del Chivito lies in the embrace of one’s inner glutton. To enjoy this sandwich is to romp in the playground of guilty pleasures. You are not savouring the taste of one high quality meat, but three stacked on top of each other. The other ingredients are so fresh and of such quality that each flavour explodes on your tongue before mixing sensuously with the others. Despite the undefined, but undoubtedly stratospheric calorie content, it would be hard for any meat lover to resist. It is a culinary coup de tat against your better judgement.
“You eat this sandwich when all you want to do is eat and enjoy consuming large quantities of red meat,” explained Rafael as we wolfed down Chivitos around 10:00 pm (the normal hour for dinner in Uruguay) on a Sunday at the Chiviteria Fergus where they serve the sandwiches in small bags to catch any sauces or relish that might escape.
Regardless of where you eat them, the experience is messy, vulgar, unrelenting, and unfailingly glorious. Considering this behemoth as you hold it firmly between two hands feels somehow epic, like staring down the opposing forces before making that final charge. It is not an experience for the faint of heart or small of stomach. You attack the sandwich, straining to fit your mouth over it without smearing the rest of your face with mayonnaise or thousand island dressing. When it’s over, the plate is scattered with fallen soldiers -- stray onions, red peppers or mushrooms that you pick at half-heartedly through a blissful, endorphin induced daze.
However, just like a hamburger from an anonymous greasy spoon will never be as good as the one grilled in the back yard during a late summer afternoon with friends and family, a Chivito eaten outside of the of the Plane tree lined streets of Montevideo or beachside diners of Punta del Este would invariably lose something. Just as Uruguayans need this sandwich as a popular expression of their infatuation with meat, the Chivito needs the Uruguayan context – late nights, close friends and family, intimate diners and big bottles of beer passed around the table – in order to be more than just a lot of meat between two slices of bread. In small, externally independent countries prone to devastating economic crises, food trends come and go very quickly. Perhaps, then, it is the staying power of the culinary and cultural traditions embodied by the Chivito that have made it so popular in this country of European transplants. As Pablo explained to me: “Consumer habits have always changed when our economy was in crisis, but our traditions never die”.