May 31, 2024

Notable Sandwiches #98: Katsu Sando

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series where I drag my long-suffering editor David Swanson through the bizarro, shifting sands of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, an instagram-worthy Japanese treat: the katsu sando.

---

It’s 3:30 pm on Thursday and I’m finally sitting down to write my column. All week it’s been nagging at my brain—what am I going to write about the katsu sandwich? I like katsu—it’s deep-fried breaded meat, what’s not to love—and I like the pillowy softness of Japanese milk bread, and I like cabbage, and I very much like kewpie mayo. Taken together, this seems like a pure win of a sandwich—the perfect combination of yield and crunch, a beloved little treat that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I’ve started my background research. I’ve even googled “The Meiji Restoration.”

Then I make the mistake of procrastinating (even further) by taking a quick peek at social media and holy shit, the Trump jury is in deliberations.

I start my previously-scheduled therapy session, and immediately bring up the Trump case. My therapist checks his phone and tells me he was convicted on thirty-four counts. I immediately, triumphantly yell this at my housemates, start texting every friend I can think of, and tweet about my undying love for Stormy Daniels. My therapist and I are both so excited we suspend the session early, as, frankly, my knotty legion of neuroses seems to have dissolved momentarily into pure bliss. My stomach is full of an unfamiliar lightness. Everyone is making really good jokes, or jokes that, in a rare dopamine rush, at least feel good. It’s not that I think this solves everything. It’s just the uncut joy of watching this brazen criminal/fascist monster experience for one second an iota of something resembling a consequence, and knowing he’s probably having a really bad day. 

I’m so excited I can’t even think about anything else.

---

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription.

---

It’s about 12 hours before my brain settles back down sufficiently for me to even contemplate returning to the Meiji Restoration. It’s 4am and now I’m sitting in an echoingly silent apartment, and my brain has run out of endorphins and is dipping perilously low in serotonin. While I haven’t developed terminal pundit brain and started declaiming about what a solemn day this is for the republic and blah blah blah, I still think it’s a good and also very funny thing to happen, and that Stormy Daniels is braver than the entire US Senate and judicial branch. But the reality of having to write a credible amount of words about the katsu sando is pressing and urgent, and now I’m exhausted to boot.

Still, I don’t want to give this delightful sandwich short shrift—or at least, any shorter than it needs to be, given the circumstances. Here’s the down and dirty quick history of the katsu sando:

During the Meiji Restoration—a complex period in Japanese history during the latter half of the nineteenth century, kicked off by an American named Matthew Perry (not the one from Friends; this one was a naval commander) who showed up circa 1854 with a fleet of warships and commanded an isolationist and socially stagnant Japan to open up for trade—or else. This led to a series of treaties with western countries so lopsided their literal historical name is the Unequal Treaties; the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the restoration of imperial rule and emperor worship, beginning under Emperor Meiji; and a stunningly rapid blitz of industrialization, Westernization, technological advancement, and the eventual expansion that led to the Japanese Empire and, ultimately, its downfall in a cloud of nuclear fallout.

Somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the many European innovations that came to transform Japan under duress was the French recipe for côtelette de veau, a breaded, pan-fried veal cutlet first promulgated by Parisian chef Joseph Menon in his 1750 cookbook La science du maître d'hôtel confiseur. In Japanese transliteration, cotelette became katsuretsu—according to the South China Morning Post, the shifts, in addition to a lack of vocal distinction between r and l, come from Japanese phonetics, which approach the distribution of vowels in syllables differently than French or English. From katsuretsu came the foreshortened form katsu. The nickname is a deserved endearment, as katsu has become a staple of Japanese cuisine. 

The dish took off in popularity circa 1899, at the restaurant Rengatei, which is still serving customers in Ginza, Tokyo, and which specialized in yōshoku—Japanified Western food, for those craving a European-adjacent culinary experience. At Rengatei, the cotelette was modified to incorporate panko bread crumbs and a deep-fry in oil, rather than the French butter pan-fry. (Included amongst the Meiji-era reforms was a lifting of a ban on consuming red meat; this opened the floodgates for katsu and other dishes from meat-obsessed Europe and America. The word yōshoku first appeared in print in 1872.) From the original veal cotelette came tonkatsu—fried pork cutlets, the most common iteration of katsu; gyukatsu, or beef katsu; hamukatsu (ham), minchikatsu (minced meat), and torikatsu (chicken katsu).

But it’s tonkatsu that usually forms the filling for the now-ubiquitous katsu sando, a dish so popular in Japan you can buy it at 7/11, and so adorable it went instagram famous. The sandwichification came about thanks to a restaurant called Isen in the Shitaya district of Tokyo; founded in 1930, the restaurant served the neighborhood’s bohemian population, including a large community of geishas. According to its website, Isen’s first female proprietress decided a katsu sandwich would be a more filling breakfast than toast and tea—and then set about cutting off the crusts and making the sandwich smaller, so as not to smear the geishas’ lipstick. A more practical and delicious geisha-friendly innovation would be hard to imagine.

Katsu is what’s known as a “boomerang word”: having originated in French (with adumbrations of the English word “cutlet”), the term migrated to Japanese as katsuretsu, and has since doubled back, populating thousands of menus across the West, and being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been since Commodore Matthew Perry swaggered up to the island country’s shoreline and changed it forever. Katsu is just a part of it—but a delicious part.

And just to bring things full circle, as I sit here mildly dazed after frenetically refreshing my screen all day: I’m glad this sandwich was inspired by geishas. If Stormy Daniels has shown us anything, it’s that the power of female performers can manifest in all kinds of surprising ways, and can linger across eras. Lipstick and changing the world can absolutely coexist—from the East to the West and everywhere in between.

Also, katsu is a good-luck meal—eaten by athletes before big games—because it’s homophonic with the verb katsu (勝つ)—“to win.” 

Xo,

Talia