Tyler Kord - A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches

Things to Put in Sandwiches

W hen Tyler and I were first married, he didnt cook at all. It was the summer of 1956, and we were living in a rural village in southern France, a far cry from the Lower East Side orphanage where wed grown up. It was the army that brought us to France, though Tylers work was classified (codes, bombs, that kind of thing) and so we couldnt discuss what he did during the hours he spent on the base. Still, it was a largely happy time, the two of us and our adopted chickens and goats roaming around the mountainous village, none of us fluent in French.

There was one grocer nearby, but I soon discovered that he saved all of his good produce for the local women, and when I arrived, he would only have one vegetable to sell me: broccoli. Every evening, I tried to rally when Tyler came home on his motorbike, his face dusty with French dirt from the bumpy road through the mountains, but at last, after several weeks of pretending that I had, in fact, chosen to purchase only a single vegetable, I gave in, and told him how wed been shamed. He held me, and we wept, missing our orphan friends back home.

Still, we made do. We plucked our chickens and boiled them. We fried eggs. We baked loaves of bread, and when we were feeling indulgent, bought pastries in the village. And we stared at the mounds of broccoli on our small countertop. Back home, in America, fresh vegetables had been a rarity. Our regular diet had consisted of pickles and potatoes, with a sprig of dill in our soup. We didnt know what to doand I, a girl of 18,

One morning, I came into the kitchen to discover Tyler already there. I asked him what he was doing, but he was so deep into whatever it was that he couldnt hear me speaking. I stepped closer, peered over his shoulder, and discovered seventeen plates of broccoli: fried broccoli, roasted broccoli, broccoli smothered with a mysterious brown sauce he claimed was Chinese, broccoli with cheese hed made from our goats milk. More and more broccoli, everywhere I looked.

My love, I said to him.

Tyler turned to look at me, my voice having finally reached him. Try the sandwich, he said, and handed me a plate.

If it hadnt been for the army, we would have returned to America that day. The future was so clearTyler and I would open a string of sandwich shops, all of them devoted to broccoli. The sandwich in my hand was so simpleroasted broccoli, cheese and nuts that must have cost him a weeks stipend, plus some shallots he had fried on the stovebut it tasted like heaven. I began to cry. I knew that he was too responsible to abandon his top-secret military post (those codes/bombs werent going to break themselves), but I also knew that no one else could do what he had done. And so we stayed in France, knowing that another life was possible.

By the time our sixth child His sandwiches were works of art, containing his heart and soul. When the zeppelin accident killed my darling Tyler at the age of 73, I thought his sandwiches had died with him. Luckily, two of our grandchildren, Henri and Emile Kord, charming young Frenchmen, have compiled their beloved Papas recipes in this volume, along with many of his own words, scribbled in secret during his army years. Their English is not perfect, but neither was his.

Rest in peace, my love, knowing that your broccoli will live forever.

Emma Straub

Were not married. In fact, by publication time, we will both be married to other people. Not only are we not married, and married to other people, but in fact we never even dated. But just go with it.

Also, we arent really orphans. In fact, when I used to work at a bookstore in Brooklyn, Tylers mother would often come in and chat with me. She is a lovely woman. My parents are okay too. Tylers father is probably lovely also but I never met him, so I cant say for sure.

This would probably happen to me.

I didnt actually get married until I was 28, dont worry.

But Im still a failure at being a housewife.

This is really how I feel about Tylers sandwiches.

Six is a lot, but why not go for it, you know?

Once, when we were in college, I stayed up late doing karaoke with Tyler and his friends, and one of them sang Queens Fat-Bottomed Girls, which I took as a compliment, whether or not it was intended as such.

New York Times bestselling author of The Vacationers, Laura Lamonts Life in Pictures, and Other People We Married; Oberlin class of 2002, sandwich lover, married to someone other than Tyler

W hats better than sandwiches?!?! Falling in love, action movies, nephews, Led Zeppelin, becoming super good friends with Tom Cruise to name a few. But sandwiches are really great too! I eat a lot of sandwiches, I make a lot of sandwiches, and I think about sandwiches a lot. But is there really anything to say about sandwiches that hasnt already been said? And do you really want to spend $35 $30 $25 $22.99 on a book about them?

Maybe! Because this book is about more than sandwiches. Im not the best chef in the world. But I am a notable chef in one of the most important restaurant cities in the world, and I have a bunch of restaurants and sandwich shops that some people who are not related to me love. And when I cook for people, I want to make things that nobody would think to make at home because it sounds so crazy. At my restaurants, I will never offer you a BLT because you can either do that at home or go to a restaurant where they dont care about being awesome. I will never make you a ham and Swiss sandwich. Unless of course thats what you really want, and then Ill make it for you.

But I would much rather make you roasted cauliflower and smoked French dressing, or meatloaf with pickled shrimp, or fried zucchini with onion puree. Look, I got extremely sick once on the way to work, and you know what I did? I went to the bathroom and cried, and proceeded to work for ten hours through incredible pain, not because I wanted to make money, but because I wanted to make people emotionally sick because of how exciting the food was! Does that make sense? It does to me, but as time goes on I keep hearing that there are a lot of things that make sense to me that dont make a ton of sense to everybody else. I drink a lot. That is an example and a possible cause.