Review 2021: The Christmas Sandwich Reviews: Co-op Turkey Feast.

Food  Did I imply that Review 2021 was over and that I wouldn't be writing about any more pre-packed Christmas sandwiches?  Yes I did.  Did I think it was over?  Well, yes.  But then having written about all of the annual reviews from across the decades at the top of all the Christmas Links and realising that it might need some kind of big finale (without getting too carried away), I decided to go after the big white whale once more, the supermarket sandwich which eluded me last year, to finally try the Co-op Turkey Feast (with smoked bacon, pork, sage & onion stuffing (which is pork AND sage & onion stuffing, not pork as a separate entity on the sandwich no matter how its implied on the box), cranberry chutney & fried onion mayo on malted bread).  Apologies for the quality of the photograph but I was in my break at work and every second counts.

Much like the rest of the supermarkets which featured last year, the Co-op (pronounced coop) has just sort of been there.  Dad was telling me earlier about how membership had been passed down hereditarily through my Mum's family and that he could even remember the number she used to give when visiting one of the local shops and how she received a dividend at the end of the year.  But it's only quite recently that it's really become part of my life, through the shops opening on Myrtle and Hardman run-on streets in Liverpool and on Lark Lane, not the Doctor Who one which is mainly residential, the real one with all the restaurants and retail.  When it opened, it was during the period with the verbose branding with "the Co-Operative" written on everything which made it feel very metropolitan somehow.  They're since returned to the more familiar homespun low-caps logo.

If you don't mind, I'll refer you to the Wikipedia page for an explanation of how the gestalt structure of the Co-op chain works and how it might go some way to explaining why there are two near identical supermarkets at the top and bottom of the same road, and why some shops feel more corporate than others and instead move on to the sandwich.  After about a year of not eating turkey, bacon, stuffing and cranberry sauce on malted bread, my taste buds have lost any baseline expertise that it they might have acquired last December.  But this seems like a pretty generic example.  Despite being out of the fridge for two hours after I bought it, the bread and filling were still cold which give everything a slightly stodgy texture.  The cranberry sauce is pretty overwhelming so the flavour of the onion mayonnaise is al most non-existent.  The bacon is thin streaky kind which otherwise finds itself wrapped around small sausages.  It's fine.