What makes a sandwich great?
As I hopscotched across Montgomery County to compile this roundup, going from sub to arepa to bao to torta, I kept coming back to something I first learned as a kid.
Decades before I became a food writer, traveling the country and the world to cover food and food culture, my oracle on all things culinary was my mother. As a young girl, she worked the counter at her parents’ corner store in Philadelphia, whipping up milkshakes, dispensing sodas from the fountain and sending customers to swooning with her sandwich-making magic. That girl grew up to be a woman with strong opinions about many things, none stronger, perhaps, than her conviction that a sandwich is not a substitute for a meal, it is a meal, and involves far more than just stacking a bunch of ingredients one on top of the other…