17-07-2025
A great sandwich can be a meal, and it can also be a gift
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Despite my lifelong love for food, cooking and eating, returning to write this newsletter after maternity leave last year was an up-and-down struggle. I had been fixing meals for my family almost every day, and felt full of ideas. But connecting the dots between the off-the-cuff cooking I had relied on in the months after my baby was born and the exacting work of recipe development was proving difficult.
Low on energy, I fell into a habit I picked up when I worked in France. I'd buy a baguette in the morning and use it as a base for all of my meals, breakfast through dinner. It acted as a starchy crutch. Baguette, butter and jam for breakfast. A haphazard egg or chickpea salad with torn pieces of baguette for lunch. Dinner? A sandwich on the last third of the baguette with whatever cheeses, meats or fish were in the fridge.
There were countless ham sandwiches, but none were as cheerful as this one, with brie and apricots.
Get the recipe: Ham and Brie Sandwich With Apricot
Around that time, a friend sent me a link to Noor Murad's newsletter, NoorishByNoor. 'I suppose I should start with how I got here, and an honest confession that a couple years ago, at the very height of my career, I fell out of love with food,' Murad wrote. 'Perhaps I should have seen it coming. … But recipes just became a deadline, cooking became a balancing act and tasting food became something I had started to dread.'
The first time I read this, I sympathized with it. What a vulnerable thing to write when developing recipes is your job! I was so deep in my own funk, though, that it would take me months to realize that the same thing had happened to me.
Winter came, and with it a gloomy, stuck-in-the-mud panic. What if I don't know how to be a working parent? I'd think, scared that the hard-won career that I was lucky to have, and that I loved, was slipping away. By January, I knew something was really wrong.
It wasn't until I took some time off work that I realized just how much had shifted in my life and my mind. My despair was not new — to me or to anyone who has struggled with significant change.
When Food and Dining editor Joe Yonan interviewed cookbook author Meera Sodha for an April piece, I found solace in their conversation about depression and care. Like Sodha, I spent too many days in bed. And also like Sodha, I leaned on food and cooking to find my way back to myself. 'I would cook for pleasure, not work,' Sodha writes in her cookbook 'Dinner.' 'I wanted to try to become more aware of my mood and feelings and work out what I wanted to eat, and slowly but surely, like kindling catching, I started to feel the fire in my belly again.'
For me, it was food that was cooked for me, dishes I made for my little family of three, and even the sandwiches, like this one, that I made to nourish myself.
If you've been to France, you might notice a resemblance between this ham sandwich and the country's famous jambon beurre. Sold at cafes, bakeries, delis and markets, it's a simple concoction: a length of baguette split open like a book, slathered with softened butter and stuffed with ham. Jambon de Paris, a wet-brined, cured ham with a mild flavor, is commonly used, but any sliced ham will do.
In this variation, I added soft brie cheese and slices of fresh apricot. Why? I could say that the brie's barnyard-y flavor complements the ham, or that the apricots look like dappled sunlight on an otherwise neutral plate of food. But it's simpler than that: It's because it brings me pleasure to eat something so rich and rewarding, something a little messy and also beautiful. It's a gift, from me to me. And now from me to you.
Get the recipe: Ham and Brie Sandwich With Apricot
