"Please Do Not Lean on Panettone..."

...Thank You

It takes a big man to make a U-turn.

OK. There are limits. I wouldn’t for example, make it my central doctrine for running a country. But... y’know. It takes a fine mind to change. Strong ideas must be lightly held or, as Marx put it, “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others””

And so it was with panettone. Why, it was but a few short weeks ago that I railled against the stuff over on Instagram, cursed it black and scorned those who venerated it.

Then, some bastard gave me one.

I’m not sure if it was actually done with malice. I’m fairly sure the donor, a kindly cove, is one of the billions who don’t follow me on socials - fact that seems infinitely to his credit, so we’ll trust to positive intent.

But I was stuck, needing to do something with the cursēd object.

I had recently seen, momentarily surfacing through the toxic crust on my feed, a loud Italian/American Effluencer who made a multi-storey deli sandwich on two slices of Panettone. Initially, I uttered the dying words of Mr Kurtz and swiped him away. But like all the best parasitic worms, it had already tunnelled its way around my eyeball and planted itself in my brainstem. 

So, before I handed the damn thing over to someone who would happily make a fully Delian bread and butter pudding with it, I harvested three horizontal slices and froze them. It would be a laugh, I thought, to make a stonking great muffaletta with it.

Now here’s the thing. I reckon if you’re going to make a U-turn, you at least owe the audience an explanation. Why? What was the process? So here, in approximate order, is what went through my mind this morning...

Process

(Preconditions: 1. I have a hangover 2. There’s no bread in the freezer.)

1. A few years after we took over Fitzbillies, I discovered the bakers would take some of the thousands of hot cross buns we make every Easter and make bacon rolls with them. I asked them to include me in the ritual, and I never looked back. They’re now on the menu and fly off the counters every year. I now look forward to Easter like no other religious holiday, and it’s got bugger all to do with the Little Baby Jesus.

2. My brother-in-law, a man I defer to in many breakfast matters, puts marmalade on his bacon bap. I mean... I wouldn’t actually do it. Christ, I’m not a barbarian. But he must have some grounds for this insalubrious practice.

3. Brown sauce is made of many fruits (I’m sorry, I won’t be taking questions on this. Chacun à son fucking goût. Get over it.)

4. That Dishoom can make a squillion quid out of a bacon naan would seem to indicate there may be benefit in experimental variance from canon.

As it happens, I’d recently stocked up on the superb bacon from Barker’s bros. in Shelford. It’s smoky, salty and thick. Not what I’d usually use (I like crappy, thin and crisp, and a whole pack per sandwich) but something told me I was going to need a lot of assertive savouriness to balance what’s effectively two slices of cake.

I fried the bacon, 5 large rashers, under a weight to maximise crisping, then briefly toasted the panettone before frying the inside face in the bacon fat.

Controversially, I always find that bacon needs to be seasoned while cooking. These days we keep bacon in the cold chain from manufacture to consumption, so there’s no preservative requirement to salt it. As a result, bacon has gently mutated, most times, to smokey dried pork strips and needs salt to reawaken its ancestral function to humanity.

This time though I had a quantity of butter with Guérande salt crystals, powerful enough to shrivel the tongue to a psittacine black stump.

Of course, you use butter in a bacon sandwich. Anything else is dangerous moral relativism.

Assembly was the work of a moment and, do you know what... I managed to choke it down. 

And I didn’t regret that I had.

A few notes.

1. Christ, it needed the salt.

2. Next time I’ll stale the panettone rather than toasting it . I imagine it will stale... eventually. Just toasting leaves the inside creamy and fluffy and worryingly close to pain perdu. And as God is my witness, that is an avenue down which I will never venture.

3. No sauce required. There’s enough going on with the bloody cake.

Now I wish I hadn’t given away the rest of it.