baconeggncheeseplease

...while every slice of pizza in New York City may not be THE WORLD'S GREATEST!!, the truth is that while there you're rarely a block away from a slice that's really, really good. And I'd say the same thing for the breakfast sandwich - and by "breakfast sandwich", I mean the classic bacon, egg & cheese on a roll. Hell, these may be even more ubiquitous than pizza. No matter how raggedy-ass, filth-ridden any bodega you wander by may look like, whatever bacon, egg & cheese they serve up to you I PROMISE will be fucking scrumptious. - XMASTIME

The hallowed BEC - along with my beloved Daily News - is one of those everyday regular things I miss so much about Brooklyn. HERE'S AN ARTICLE ON ITS HISTORY listing just how awesome the damn bacon, egg & cheese really is:

A 1926 publication from the University of Minnesota on “Selection and Use of Bacon” includes a recipe for a bacon-egg club sandwich served on buttered toast with mayo and tomatoes. Somewhat similar—but a Google Books search for the phrase bacon, egg, and cheese specifically doesn’t turn up anything relevant until 1990, and bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll doesn’t show up until the end of that decade.

You can also request a specific kind of cheese, but the standard-issue sandwich definitely comes with American. Because it’s made by blending cheese with emulsifying salts (amongst other things), American cheese has the ability “to melt without breaking or turning greasy the way a traditional cheese does,” in the words of food columnist J. Kenji López-Alt. A common choice for an emulsifying salt is sodium citrate.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you have a revelation about what's the correct cheese to use for the BEC over a decade ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

2011 was the year I finally gave up trying to be fancy and accepted that the best cheese for a cheeseburger was good ol' American cheese. Who did I think I was impressing with Cheddar? Who the fuck did I think I was all those years, a Kennedy?