James Beard's Famous Onion Sandwich Recipe | Jacques Pépin Cooking at Home | KQED

Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin, and I'm cooking at home. Many years ago, I was in New York at James Beard's house. I was very friends with James Beard, you know, in the 60s, 70s, and so forth. One time I was at his house, he was doing his famous onion sandwich. I've done it several times at home, because my wife loves it. So I want to show you how to do it. And those were a round sandwich. So if you have a cutter like this, you can cut it with this. Try to get it to lose the least amount of bread. And I have that glass. Well, it's not very cutting, but I can still cut it after with a knife, just to mark it. Yeah, OK. And so I will cut it a little bit here. Remember that you always keep the trimming, you know, to do breadcrumb. I always do breadcrumb with those trimmings. You put that in the food processor, and you have beautiful, fresh breadcrumb. And it is actually quite different than the breadcrumb that you buy, because the one which is dry, you have much more bread in it. So here, I have two round things. We want to put mayonnaise on top of it. Generous with the mayonnaise. Here, again here, and the slice of onion. You could add an onion the same size as your sandwich and get sliced. Probably a bit harder, a bit easier to do it with half an onion. And cut two thin slices like this. One, two, that's it. So what you want to do now, a little bit of salt on top of it, forget the salt. Then the other slice of bread, really glue it together. And what you want to do now is to put a little bit of mayonnaise on the outside. If, of course, you can prepare ahead. And finally, I think James Beard did it with parsley. In that case, I'm doing it with chives. Just dip it into chives like that. Beautiful onion sandwich here that I can cut in half. And this is one sandwich that my wife loved. Well, James Beard's sandwich gave me an idea for another sandwich. In France, we already have radish with butter and bread and salt on top of it. So I'm going to do a radish sandwich at that time. Instead of mayonnaise here, I'm using butter. OK. Sweet unsalted butter, which is what I use at home. OK. And then the radish. So you can cut the radish to have them very thin like that, which is what I'm doing here. OK, so I have a bunch of radish here, very thinly sliced. I'm going to fill up the bread with that. Here, here, there, on top, here, here. Love radish. Bit of salt, the other bread on top, glue it together. Then I'm going to trim it. This one is going to be square. That's not a round, but doesn't really matter. OK. And on the side, in the same way, I'm going to put a little bit of butter on the side. OK, here. OK. And likewise, in that case, I'm dipping it in parsley rather than chive, but could be one or the other. Doesn't really matter. Here we are. My radish sandwich. That's it. The radish sandwich, the onion sandwich. Great for lunch. Happy cooking.