BLT

The BLT as we know it didn't crystallize into its now-canonical form until after World War II, when year-round availability of lettuce and tomatoes through American supermarket chains made it possible to assemble the sandwich at any time of year. Its earliest ancestors were tea sandwiches in late Victorian England, small, crustless triangles of bread filled with bacon, lettuce, and tomato, which appeared in cookbooks in the 1900s. American diner cooks adapted the idea, scaling it up and toasting the bread for crunch. By the 1950s, the BLT was a fixture on lunch counters across the country, helped along by booming bacon production and the rise of Hellmann's and Best Foods mayonnaise as pantry staples. The acronym itself didn't become common until the 1960s, when shorthand abbreviations on diner order tickets entered everyday speech. The sandwich has no single inventor and no single birthplace, it's a product of mid-century American convenience and abundance.

The BLT is the sandwich Americans eat when they want something simple but satisfying. It's the centerpiece of late summer when home-grown tomatoes hit their peak, and food writers spend every August publishing essays about how a great BLT depends entirely on the tomato. It's a diner staple, a brunch upgrade, and the subject of endless minor variations, add avocado for a BLAT, swap turkey bacon, use sourdough, add a fried egg. Despite the additions, purists insist the original four ingredients are perfect as built. The sandwich also functions as a kind of culinary litmus test: a restaurant that can't make a great BLT probably can't make anything else worth ordering.