American Independence Day: Balthazar serves up "le sandwich Américain" for Fourth of July

It is 53 years since Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, her exposé of the US funeral industry, and I often think I might fill the gap with my own volume, called The American Way of Sandwiches (death and some American sandwiches not being always without connection). It would not just enumerate the more egregious examples of what can be done with two bits of bread, but would also be a celebration – because sometimes the excesses of American sandwiches are right on the money.

One sees the true force of the ingenuity for which our American cousins are known in the "le sandwich Américain". The creation of American-accented French restaurant, Balthazar, which has outposts in Covent Garden and New York, it will be on sale through the weekend in celebration of American Independence Day. It is frankly colossal. To make it, they grill a pain au lait hot dog bun, lay an organic beef patty upon its billowy innards, crown it with 180g of French fries, burnish with some cheese and then throw in lots of spicy Marie rose sauce.

Nothing quite matches the braggadocio of Americans when it comes to this genre of food. Though many have tried, of course. Think of France's upwardly mobile "pain bagnat", which affects to be a picnic in a sandwich, but is really only a small salade niçoise in the embrace of pain de champagne. Or the banh mi, beloved in Vietnam, which involves a baguette, belly pork and, more often than not, rather a lot of paté. Both are nice, both are substantial, but neither is loosen-the-belt, cancel-the-afternoon American big.

What the US sandwich makers do so well is to put one meal inside another meal, with wit and verve. Le sandwich Américain is, after all, a steak frites sandwich in a sub. It is all fun and silly and tasty and not likely to cause you to have an aneurysm.

Some US creations do, without question, tip the scales a little too far, though. I can't imagine anyone getting much other than the most fleeting of pleasures from those "Double Down" KFC sandwiches, which do away with bread and instead use deep-fried chicken. Or the "melo", made by the Carnegie Deli in New York and named for vertiginous Knicks player Carmelo Anthony: it is approximately 1ft tall and seems to involve every cured bit of pork known to man along with a single slice of lettuce.

The good ones, though, are wonderful because they are so down home, the buttery antidote to the pricey, social-climbing sandwiches of Europe's capital cities, with their coppa, and their sea-salt butter and rye crust. They are suffused, like so much that is good in America, with a sense of adventure, as if they have been specifically created for horny-handed men on horses probing the Western frontier, or people engaged in the construction of very tall buildings. They are the embodiment of a certain greedy, questing American dream. In this sense, USA is certainly A-OK.