Eats
Labor Day Dinner: BLTs
Hello, everybody.
Today is Labor Day, a federal holiday here in the United States, in honor of the labor movement and the vast contributions of working people to our country. Unless you’re a union member with a parade and picnic planned, the holiday tends to be an enjoyable day off work and school, perhaps near a body of water, sighing over how fast the summer is fading.
In our house, we eat BLTs.
Even in a household containing vegetarians, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich is the perfect dish. It’s easy to leave out any element that offends, and you are still left with the other equally delicious components. A plain tomato sandwich, in the height of summer, does not need one more thing. We’ve even had guests around our BLT table who do not eat the B or the T. (One solution: avocado. Another: mozzarella.)
BLTs can go low, or they can go high, yet like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, they’re always able to make it in the USA. I have enjoyed many a diner BLT made with floppy, oversalted bacon and watery iceberg lettuce on Wonder bread toast, with a scant dollop of mayo staring up at me from a paper condiment cup. They were absolutely delicious.
I have also made the Union Square Cafe Cookbook luxe version, with thick slices of peppered bacon, pedigreed tomatoes (the noble Black Krim, the roguish Mister Stripey), and sourdough bread that was kneaded on old-growth oak. The result: also mighty fine eating. In fact, legendary.
I like to make BLTs on Labor Day weekend, as a farewell to summer. If there are more than a handful of people to feed, it’s a hero’s journey to fry all that bacon and assemble the many platters of the other ingredients. And don’t get me started on the toasting! The toasting takes forever, unless you want to turn on the oven and heat up the whole kitchen. But it’s so worth it. Everybody is happy building their own stack of summery bits. Your first course: a BLT. Second course: half a BLT. Dessert: the juice left on the tomato platter.
Advanced Placement BLTs
Are you looking for an extra-credit version of the BLT? Would you like to be able to serve BLTs to a group with only one platter? This is America, home of root-beer-float-flavored Peeps. We have the technology!
People who know of my penchant for BLT-ification have sent me these two recipes.
Food 52’s BLT Salad
Watch Amanda Hesser make it at home here.
Melissa Clark’s BLT Tart
(If you hit the New York Times paywall, there are similar recipes here and here.)
I haven’t tried them yet, but these are reliable sources. If you make one of them, please let me know how it goes, and I will do the same. You can cook with confidence: BLT ingredients can stand up to the most creative recipe tweaking.
Happy Labor Day, all! If you love the ILGWU anthem, please join me in rocking out to Natalie Douglas’s “Look for the Union Label/If I Had a Hammer” mashup.
Nothing like a BLT! With a chocolate egg cream for me please. The video was sweet and even a little moving. Happy holiday everyone.
Yesterday’s lunch: BLT (those three components from the farm down the road), good dollop of homemade basil pesto (from the pots on my deck), bit of mayo, on local sourdough, the whole thing in the panini machine, with a sun tea – lemonade Arnold Palmer chaser.
Yummmmm! I love pesto on BLTs too.
It’s 6 am and you have my mouth watering for a BLT. We are dry camping outside Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah and we only have the B, no tomatoes, no lettuce, no bread and we are 5 days out from doing a food resupply.
A favorite in our household is BLT pasta: excellent tomatoes, a few slices of bacon ( it doesn’t take a lot to make the whole thing taste bacony), an enormous amount of fresh basil as a stand in for the lettuce, over the pasta of your choice. Sometimes i cook up some mushrooms in the bacon fat. an always popular summer meal
A peach cobbler homemade of course with farm stand peaches is a summer specialty. I also enjoy water melon salad with fresh mint, feta and black olives. Ratatouille with a bevy of veggies from Copley farmer’s market, the biggest in Boston! Bacon and I are not great friends but, I once enjoyed a BLT.
Recently, the Kitchen’s Jeff Marro aka sandwich king, created a BLS a bacon lettuce and garden grown strawberry sandwich. It looked and sounded delicious to me.
Summer breakfast, a farmer’s locally grown cantaloupe cut in half, seeds scooped out and filled with cottage cheese, slice of avocado toast. Healthy and tasty.
Happy Labor Day! Support local businesses
You got me on a memory of Wonder bread, mayo and tomatoes. We liked it because the bread was like a sponge!! Now i think Yuck!!!
Many of the pieces I work with have the ILGWU label in them, and it never fails to create an ear worm of that jingle in my head. Timely reminder!
Enjoy your BLTs!
We spent the whole summer #shelterathome – it will be so different when it gets cold. The only cold event I am looking forward to is a certain date in January, science over fiction and hope over fear. I miss the City.
Signed, granddaughter of a tailor and a woman who worked in a corset factory.
I make a tempeh bacon for our vegan household but a blt no matter how you eat it is so yummy!
Tasty! For the basic vegetarians fried Halloumi cheese is better than bacon IMHO. Crispy salty deliciousness and a melting middle.
Oh, you’ve inspired me. I definitely haven’t had enough blts, (I like to add avocado and onion to mine, making them blatos, add cheese, you get cobalts) this summer. And the tomatoes couldn’t be more ready. Yum!
My new favorite sandwich is hummus, tomato, baked tofu, spinach and onions on bread. No one else in the house likes it so I don’t have to share with anyone!
A summer standard supper! But thanks for the memories on “Look for the Union Label” I can still sing that jingle!!
So funny! When I read BLTs, I thought you meant “Bites, Licks and Tastes”! (As a WW coach, that is how we refer to mindless grazing and careless snacking) Today we will offer our grandson his first bites of fresh caught crab.
Those are some gorgeous tomatoes you have! I don’t eat the “B” but we have been known to make BLT frittatas with basil or spinach instead of lettuce. Avocado, lettuce and tomato for me today on toast!
My grandma was an ILGWU member, my parents were in teacher’s unions, and I’m a retired librarian member of CSEA. Thanks for the reminders of what today is about.
Here’s a southern specialty from our dear from Gary. BLT with a fried egg. Now that’s delicious and sets you up right for the day. I go with avocado instead of bacon. Using home grown tomatoes and lettuce it’s all good .
I don’t like raw tomatoes (hush! I DO know what I’m missing and I really don’t miss it at all!), but recently discovered the Bacon, Lettuce, and Strawberry sandwich. Sub sliced strawberries for the tomato, and add a little balsamic vinegar to the mayo. I’ve also used spinach in place of the lettuce. So good!
Fiestaware!! Love that stuff. I enjoy choosing the plate colors that go best with the food I’m putting on them. Part of the fun of the meal.
Now I can confess that I drank the juices left from yesterday’s caprese salad. Perfect dessert! One of my favorite BLTs was my attempt to copy the 2018 Minnesota State Fair’s favorite BLT with corn coulis and pesto stirred into the mayo. My memories of Wonder Bread BLTS have Miracle Whip, not mayonnaise. The best BLTs are shared with family. Enjoy the rest of your Labor Day weekend.
The Natalie Douglas mash up was outstanding!
With the way my homegrown tomatoes have been coming in this summer, BLTs are a food group onto themselves!! YUM
I make tofu bacon for my BLT’s – your vegetarian family members might enjoy that.
It’s good to remember what today’s holiday is all about. When I was a little girl, my Mama ALWAYS looked for the union label.
BLTs are the PERFECT dinner for today!!
My favorite meal that can only be had during high summer: BLTs, corn on the cob, and melon!
Is anyone else particular about BLT assembly? Tomato first, bacon next, then lettuce.
Lucky Southerners to have those beautiful veggies. I’d give my oldest child, if I had any, for a luscious tomato and some field peas.
Thanks for helping with today’s menu. I am adding these amazing Shake and Bake Sweet Potatoes (https://spicysouthernkitchen.com/shake-and-bake-sweet-potatoes/) that are amazing even eaten cold at 10 p.m.!
I too love the Fiestaware! Funny to get such pleasure from butter for the corn in a small blue bowl. The interplay of those colors!
I bake my bacon in the oven in a jelly roll pan – it saves all the frying and turns out just perfect every time 🙂
Bless you!! I practically ran to the fridge to make BLTs! Ended up making the salad. You never cease to inspire!
I remember that jingle!
I was a member of the ILWU Local 37 out of Seattle when I worked salmon cannery in Alaska during college summers, but that’s a very different union. International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union! (And whoa, the local number just popped into my head, 40 years later.)
Wow, this is the best comment on here today! College kids today don’t work these kinds of jobs anymore, do they? I worked fast food in college for a while at the big M, and we could have used a union. It’s hard greasy work. My husband worked in a Styrofoam cup factory. But we always knew we were not going to do those jobs forever.
Actually, they do. All of them? No, of course not, but that was never the case. But my stepson worked a manufacturing line, my husband has several students who have worked in factory floors AND in fishing canneries, etc. (And I myself worked on Labor Day — as I have every Labor Day for the past 20+ years — teaching some of those same college students.)
i am a fan of BLTs too. i really acquired my taste for them when our family spent 3 years living in Houston, Tx. UK restaurants and cafes don’t quite make them as well as American ones do.
here in Scotland (and the rest of the UK too) the bacon roll (2 or 3 rashers of back bacon in a soft bread roll which may or may not be buttered. tomato ketchup or brown sauce available if required) is a firm favourite with everyone and especially beloved of those in the building/construction trades.
most cafes offer it as an all day option. and i firmly believe that the bacon roll is one of the few things that can be eaten at any time of the day (or night – but that’s a different story!)
I love a bacon roll but feel they can only be eaten in the UK for some reason. The magic doesn’t cross the ocean.
As much of an anglophile as I am, I still struggle to understand the appeal of brown sauce. I mean, it’s called brown sauce. How can that be a good thing?
Yum!!! BLATS are my favorite, add avocado to everything! And glad to see that you are a Kensington fan, they make delicious condiments and we love everything they make, including the chipotle mayo!
My young people know they can make me inordinately happy with a jar of Sir K’s anything!
100/100 agree on ALL the Sir Kensington’s offerings, delectable.
I lost all my tomato plants in the Denver snow last week: heartbroken!
Reporting in. Made Melissa Clark’s BLT tart last night. Did it BLRC because that’s what I had, Rainbow Chard from the CSA. Good! Quite different than a sandwich. Won’t cover the joy of communal sandwich building, however. It was so good there is none left for breakfast!