Freddie’s, Belle Vue, Rowland Hill Street, London NW3 2AQ (freddiesdeli.co.uk). Breakfast plates £6-£15; starters £8-£13; sandwiches and platters £7-£17.50; desserts £4.50-£8; unlicensed
Today, I am rehearsing for my dotage. I am doing this by gripping a properly stacked salt beef sandwich; the sort of multilayered, bulging affair that challenges the structural integrity of the sliced rye bread which is trying and failing to enclose it. The cure on the thick-cut tangle of salt beef is deep and there’s just enough amber fat to lubricate everything. On the side are sweet-sour “bread and butter” pickles, so called because the Illinois cucumber farmers who devised the recipe in the 1920s were able to barter their pickles for household goods, like bread and butter. This is the kind of vital intelligence I will share with younger companions over a salt beef sandwich when I am a certified alte kaker, Yiddish for old fart. Having just told this story, perhaps I am already eligible for certification.
