Some Stray Musings on the Importance of the Tomato, to a Sandwich

So I'm trying to figure out what kind of a sandwich would benefit from leaving the tomato off? I don't think there is one! Yeah, okay - maybe the sandwich that you're making for some allergic FREAK with anti-tomato disease. Yeah, that one, that sandwich, you can leave it off*. But otherwise? In all other cases? I can't think of any!

Peanut butter, you say? WRONG. Try it! A flavorful, fresh juicy slice of tomato on there blows the very idea of jelly out of the picture! And don't say "peanut butter and jelly" - as I've indicated, that would not be a case of where the sandwich would benefit from leaving the tomato off. It would be a case where the sandwich would benefit from leaving the jelly off. It goes without saying that in some cases, you'd need to bump a clashing ingredient to make room for our sweet sandwich savior, tomato.

What about a tuna sandwich, you say? Well that's just silly! Now you're grasping at straws - people put a tomato slice on there all the time! It's standard, especially for a melt - one slice tomato, tucked in snug under a blanket of cheese, heated red juices seeping down into the tuna salad as the cheese bubbles and browns - aw MAN! How can your mouth NOT be watering?

And I'll admit, it might be theoretically possible to design a sandwich from the ground up specifically to compensate for the lack of tomato, or in such a way as to logically exclude the possibility of there being a tomato - but why handicap yourself and your sandwich enjoyment, just to spite me when you already know that yeah, I'm kinda right on this one?

But when it comes to the tomato and the sandwich, the piece-of-resistance is of course, the humble simplicity and towering crunch-blast of perfection that is the BLT: a slice of dark rye (for preference), a crunchy shvoosh! of iceberg lettuce (that's a half-inch thick cross-section performed confidently with chef knife, so that instead of a weird unwieldy lumpen leaf or two, you have a fresh layer of firm nooky crannies and crinkles exposed - they sort of fall into and intertwine with the bacon!), a pile of crisp sizzling bacon, two fat slices of tomato, and on the bottom slice of dark rye - mayo. Quite a bit of it.

Now, long term readers will know that I'm not a mayonnaise FREAK by any means. I barely touch the stuff, except as an ingredient (deviled eggs, salads, such). As a spread, as a condiment, I tend to hold it entirely. But I will admit that that zing of interaction between the mayo and tomato on a perfect BLT is a thing of beauty. That's one place where mayo really comes into its own, and can shine. And to a lesser extent, from that standpoint, yeah, I can see where you might want to put some mayo next to the delicious tomato, on any sandwich where tomato is included.

Which should be EVERY SANDWICH.

For the tomato I mean. Not the mayo. Mayo is a defensible option, that's as far as I'll take it.