BACON EGG LETTUCE AND TOMATO SANDWICH

SOME MIGHT ARGUE THAT THIS IS MORE OF A LUNCH DISH than a breakfast one. That may well have been true prior to the multitude of one-handed breakfast sandwiches originally offered only at drive through windows but now ubiquitous.

Take two sides of a biscuit, bagel, croissant or English muffin and put in a perfectly round hard fried egg and top it with a sausage patty and/or cheese slice and, voila: breakfast on the run. A BELT is a horse of a different color.

My wife introduced me to what has become our favorite breakfast sandwich shortly after we were married. I don’t remember if it was a Saturday or Sunday when we first had this, but I can guarantee it was late—late enough so my usually rigid split between what was proper breakfast food and what was proper luncheon food could have been and was compromised.

It was late because we had most likely tipped-toed up to our third floor apartment quite late. The apartment was the top floor of a huge old home with a carefully tended front yard and highly polished wooden staircase, which we sometimes bounced off of as we made our way to our garret space.

We tipped-toed because our landlord and landlady frowned on drinking. To get the apartment, which was a spacious three room furnished attic apartment renting for $90 per month, we had undergone a polite but thorough grilling by the couple a month or so before our wedding, during which we talked of our ritual attendance at Sunday Mass, our consistent straight Republican party voting record, our devotion to our parents and our promise to avoid hosting parties and coming in late.

With a lot of finger crossing, we got the apartment and a year’s worth of worsening glares from our landlord and landlady who gradually discovered the truth: we didn’t make Sunday Mass all that often and I’m a Democrat. But we did respect our parents and were too poor to have many parties.

The apartment was in a section of Pittsburgh called Bloomfield, which was where my wife was born and lived for the first 12 years of her life. She had lived in a row house on a side street a few miles from our apartment.

By the time we moved there, the neighborhood had started what was to be a long and stately transformation from a neighborhood composed of Italian, Irish or Polish Catholics to a gentrified neighborhood with a substantial population of students from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and one that today proclaims itself as Pittsburgh’s Little Italy. I guess most of the Irish and Polish left.

More than 30 years later, Bloomfield re-entered our lives when our daughter rented an apartment about two blocks from where we began our marriage while she was in law school at Pitt. She not only re-discovered our old neighborhood, she fell in love with many of the same places as we had. Some connections never get severed. She tells me she even enjoys a BELT from time to time.

Here are the directions for doing one sandwich. Do the math for more. A few things are important to note if you want the full enjoyment of this concoction. You must cook the egg in the bacon grease, burned specs of fat and all. Also, do not use one of those metal rounds that form the egg into a perfect circle a la Egg McYou-know-who. This sandwich demands a flatter egg closer to the size of a slice of bread.

As with most recipes, when the execution is simple, success is in the freshness of the ingredients.

BELT: The Recipe

For each serving

Ingredients

Two slices of toast. Good old white bread is the stand-by but pick your favorite.

Four slices of bacon. Cooked to your liking. I like it crisp.

One egg fried over hard.

A leaf of leaf lettuce. The lettuce must be cold and crisp. Use leaf lettuce if possible. Iceberg will do, but only the outermost leaves.

A few slices of tomato. The tomatoes must be home grown or at least taste like it. Unless you can get tomatoes with the kind of flavor they have in late summer, the sandwich will not live up to its potential.

Mayonnaise

Salt and pepper to taste

First: Sauté the bacon in its own grease until it is whatever consistency you like.

Second: Reduce the heat until the grease is not quite smoking. Begin toasting the bread. Break the egg into the grease and break the yolk. Cook the egg for a few minutes; turning to make sure the yolk is fully cooked. Remove the egg from the pan and drain on paper towels.

Third: Assemble the sandwich. Spread mayo on the bottom piece of toast. Lay down the egg first, then the bacon, the lettuce and finally the tomato. Spread mayo on the top piece of toast before topping off the sandwich.

And finally: Slice the sandwich on the diagonal and enjoy.