All Hail the Scuttlebutt

I’m Krysten, an associate editor at New York Times Cooking, taking over for Tanya this week. And I love sandwiches.

A sandwich is one of life’s great pleasures: two pieces of crisp-tender bread, filled with any combination of deliciousness, drizzled or smeared with a glorious sauce. They’re portable, affordable and — critically, for the purposes of this newsletter — amenable to vegetables.

It’s with great excitement that I share the sandwich list my brilliant colleagues have put together after months of work. Woven in among these 57 unmissable New York City classics, new and old, are a handful of veg-focused favorites, including one near and dear to my heart: the Scuttlebutt.

All hail the Scuttlebutt, a perfect expression of the form, from Saltie, a beloved, now-closed Brooklyn sandwich shop. To say Saltie to a Brooklynite of a certain era is to send that person straight into nostalgia, to conjure a memory of sitting at the counter of the South Williamsburg shop, eagerly taking that first sloppy bite and savoring the rubble that fell out the back end.

So strong is the Scuttlebutt’s allure that a friend once hosted a party dedicated to its assembly, lovingly preparing the focaccia, pickling the beets, boiling the eggs and picking the herbs. We each built our own, piled high with this culinary bounty, and dug in, joyously: an ode to our long-missed Saltie.

Gloriously, the sandwich made its return in 2020, three years after Saltie closed, when the chef Caroline Fidanza started selling it at Marlow and Sons in Brooklyn. And now we have the Scuttlebutt recipe!