FROM "NANCY SILVERTON'S SANDWICH BOOK"
	With fresh asparagus and eggs, this open-faced sandwich from Nancy Silverton's new book could be the centerpiece of a spring brunch.

When I was a kid, riding around in a car with Pop, "grabbing a bite" usually meant grabbing a sandwich. For, just like the celebrated earl of Sandwich, for whom this light repast was named, Pop didn't want the action to stop on account of his need for nourishment.

The earl was a gambler who didn't want the gaming to end, so he ordered up a couple slices of bread with meat pressed in between. Pop would pull up to the A&P or the Winn-Dixie and send one of us kids inside to buy a loaf of white bread, a package of bologna and a stack of American cheese slices. We'd slap everything together and wash it down with Dr. Pepper.

This all came back to me while I was poring over "Nancy Silverton's Sandwich Book, the Best Sandwiches Ever — from Thursday Nights at Campanile." Silverton, with her husband, Mark Peel, owns La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. She decided to write the book when, at the end of a "food junket" in Tuscany, she vowed she'd never eat again.

"Our final stop on the tour was a small neighborhood crostini bar in Florence, Fuori Porta, where locals come in the evening to eat a simple meal of toasted bread with toppings." In the presence of those simple Italian sandwiches, her appetite revived, and before she knew it, she, too, was "eating grilled bread rubbed with garlic and layered with prosciutto, arugula, and Parmesan."

Asparagus, Poached Egg, Prosciutto and Fontina Cheese

Back home in L.A., she was determined to re-create that experience for her guests, but the restaurant wasn't really about sandwiches. So on Thursday nights, the bar at Campanile became the scene of Sandwich Night, and a new collection of great sandwich recipes was born.

Like Silverton's crostini in Florence, my first ham sandwich in Paris was a revelation. Who knew that the bread's yeasty aroma could marry the smoky scent of the ham and that together, the two smells could rise like a prayer on a cloud of incense? No butter, no mayonnaise, nothing stood to interfere with the naked coupling of ham and bread.

Later came my first croque monsieur, a relatively complex edifice of ham and bread and GruyËre cheese topped with a thick, white Mornay sauce bound with more GruyËre, all browned under a gas-burning salamander. That sandwich, eaten off a plate while seated across from my wife at a cafÈ in Chartres, tasted like a coming of age — and demanded a savoring approach.

The food designed to be grabbed and eaten with one hand had become a food requiring a knife and fork. The sandwich had come full circle. Silverton's book brings the sandwich 'round the circle again, taking wild and wonderful liberty with the whole concept.

"Snackbreads" are circles of bread dough topped with roasted peppers, caramelized onions or wedges of radicchio. The Lemon Cake Club Sandwich in a Glass is a wily way to sneak in a recipe for individually-sized trifles. And if some of the recipes, like the one for Brandade SautÈed Pea Tendrils, Poached Egg and Moroccan Olives, take days of preparation, it doesn't matter. Other sandwiches are easy; the ones in this book are interesting.

Single-subject cookbooks can feel like a concept looking for a market, but this book is the real thing, a tribute to a genre of foods all of us can relate to but few explore in any real depth. A quick perusal will have you making a list of what you'll need to fix one of these sandwiches for dinner.