The Great Club Sandwich Debate: Turkey Or Chicken?

If we had a sandwich for every sandwich debate in circulation, we'd have meal-prepped lunch for at least, like, a week. You've got the classic "is a hot dog a sandwich?" conversation. Then there's Cheez Whiz, American, and provolone battling it out for Philadelphia cheesesteak supremacy — similar to the mayo and butter vis-à-vis grilled cheese conundrum, not to mention dissent over the best dairy varieties to toast. Let's not forget regional feuds like which New England state has the tastiest lobster roll. Even after that litany, we're still leaving plenty of other sandwich contentions on the table. A lesser-known existential culinary question might still sound a little familiar: Should a club sandwich be made with turkey or chicken?

Plenty of recipes allow for either bird in the room service staple, though some defer to one over the other. There is no contemporary consensus for what a club sandwich must be. Why, even the triple-decker sandwich's seemingly signature middle slice of bread was a later addition. Frequently cited as the earliest published club sandwich recipe, instructions in the 1903 edition of the "Good Housekeeping Everyday Cookbook" allow for either poultry. And a version made with chicken or turkey plus ham appeared on the menu at one of the New York clubs credited with inventing the sandwich even earlier, in 1889. So this contentious decision really seems to fall to camps: Sandwich eaters who'll only cross the road for chicken, and those more keen to gobble turkey.

Anecdotally, any club sandwich that we can recall has been made with turkey. Sandwiches are most commonly eaten at lunch, turkey is a more typical lunch meat than chicken (how many chicken cold cut varieties does your deli have?), and, perhaps owing a little something to confirmation bias, "turkey club" simply sounds more legitimate than "chicken club." But there's also a precedent for chicken.

Still looming over the food world even after his death in 1985, the Dean of American Cookery himself, James Beard, who hated the modern club sandwich, derided the use of turkey as some kind of corrupted contemporary novelty. After referring to the three-decker as a "horror," Beard wrote that "nowadays practically everyone uses turkey and [there's] a vast difference between turkey and chicken where sandwiches are concerned" in his 1972 book "James Beard's American Cookery." This bit of passionate complaining seems to point to turkey's ubiquity by the 1970s. So, not only is it today's more popular option, but thanks to Beard a turkey club is even a little iconoclastic. Try saying the same about chicken.