THE HISTORY OF THE SANDWICH

John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, painted by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783.

"He freed mankind from the hot lunch. We owe him so much. Funeral oration delivered to the Earl of Sandwich, as imagined
by Woody Allen in Getting Even, 1971"

Viewed historically, the ‘sandwich’ is a riddle. Common sense tells us that the thing itself – meat, cheese or whatever else happened to be to hand wedged inside bread – must be one of the oldest and most universal types of meal, at least in bread-eating countries. Yet the name itself is very specific and belongs to one man – the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu (1718–1792), who, too busy to stop for dinner, called for some beef between two slices of bread. So the earl gets credited with inventing something that must have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years.

As a method of filling the belly, the sandwich is as basic and eternal as soup. As the Larousse Gastronomique notes, ‘It has long been the custom in rural France, for example, to give farm labourers working in the fields meat for their meal enclosed in two slices of brown bread.’1 The same was true in all the peasant countries of Europe. Workers did not need to give this snack a name. It was just what you ate.

In an epigram circulating in Regency England about the Earl Spencer (who popularized a short jacket) and the Earl of Sandwich, ‘the one invented half a coat/the other half a dinner’.2 But it cannot be that John Montagu ‘invented’ the sandwich in the way that Auguste Escoffier invented Peach Melba, or Caesar Cardini invented the Caesar salad. The earl did not set out to be a culinary innovator, and he certainly was not the first person to eat the food that now bears his name.

A story by Woody Allen (‘Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?’) plays with the absurdity of anyone inventing such a thing as the sandwich.3 In the story, the Earl of Sandwich discovers as a child that he has ‘an unusual interest in thinly sliced strips of roast beef and ham’. In his early fixation with inventing the sandwich, he endures many disasters. His first attempt is two slices of bread topped with a slice of turkey. Then he tries three slices of ham all on top of one another, with no bread. Finally, in triumph, in the small hours of 27 April 1758, the earl thinks to place ham and mustard inside two slices of rye bread – eureka! His invention is instantly feted. There is clearly something comically absurd about giving the sandwich a single point of origin, as if it were a light bulb or a spinning jenny.

Nevertheless, it is striking how rapidly the ‘sandwich’ became established in the language in the space of just a few years in the 1760s and ’70s, and how it has remained there, forever linked to John Montagu’s name. While Montagu didn’t invent the ‘sandwich’ per se, we cannot ignore the fact that every time we eat one, we invoke his name. Why?

The usual story, repeated in almost every potted history of the sandwich, is this: the earl was an inveterate gambler, who was so busy playing all-night cards that he was unwilling to leave the table to get something to eat. Being hungry, he ordered a piece of meat between two slices of bread to be brought to him at the card table. The source of this story is a chatty French travel book, Grosley’s Tour of London (first published in 1770 as Londres), based on a stay in London during 1765. Grosley wrote:

"A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorpt in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a piece of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister who invented it."4

The fourth earl’s biographer, the naval historian N.A.M. Rodger, casts doubt on this account. In 1765 Montagu was a cabinet minister and ‘very busy’, with little time for all-night gambling sessions.5

In truth, Montagu’s reputation as a notorious gambler was hardly justified. He was not averse to placing the odd wager – for example, he laid down fifty guineas that the Chevalier d’Eon, a transvestite French diplomat, was not a woman – and he enjoyed having small bets with his Huntingdonshire neighbours on the relative distances of various country roads. But by the standards of his contemporaries, his gambling was not excessive (not least because by the standards of the British aristocracy, he was poor).6 The alternative explanation is that instead of being engrossed at the card table, Montagu was busily at work at his desk. He was a politician of tremendous, restless energy who twice served as First Lord of the Admiralty (in 1748–51 and again in 1771–83), once as Postmaster General (in 1768) and twice as Secretary of State (from 1763 and 1770). At the Admiralty, he was responsible for the vast job of reforming the entire British naval administration. Rodger finds the desk explanation plausible, since ‘we have ample evidence of the long hours he worked from an early start, in an age when dinner was the only substantial meal of the day, and the fashionable hour to dine was four o’clock’.7

The sandwich is the ideal desk-bound meal for someone so immersed in paper that they have no time to stop. The crucial innovation of a sandwich, as opposed to a plate containing its component parts – bread and cheese or bread and meat – is that it can be eaten one-handed. The other hand is free to turn pages, sign documents, write letters – in other words, to carry on as if no food were being consumed at all. Orlando Montagu, who is the fourth earl’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, remarks that ‘our family suffers from a patience deficit’.8

But as the word took hold as it did – by 1773, it was used in a cookbook for the first time9 – there must sometimes have been witnesses to John Montagu’s sandwich-eating, which suggests that he did not always eat them alone. And these witnesses must have found something distinctive enough in Montagu’s sandwich habit that they thought to name it after him. A tall, awkward man with a fondness for skittles and a passion for music (his long-standing mistress, Martha Ray, was an opera singer), Sandwich clearly had the kind of character that made people want to name things after him. Captain Cook, who reported to him at the Admiralty, named the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands) after him. The naming of the sandwich suggests that people emulated him in more trivial matters too. Sandwich’s friends must have seen him or heard him ordering his cold meat between two slices of bread and asked for ‘the same as Sandwich’ or words to that effect. Within a few months or years ‘the same as Sandwich’ was shortened to ‘sandwich’.

The first known use of the word comes from another great man of the age. On 24 November 1762 the historian Edward Gibbon (author of 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire') recorded in his Journal an evening spent in London. He dined with his friend Holt at the Cocoa-Tree in St James’s Street, and then saw a production of Dryden’s The Spanysh Fryar. He then returned to the Cocoa-Tree, of which he wrote:

"That respectable body, of which I have the honour to be a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered in a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich, & drinking a glass of punch."10

This tells us a great deal: that the early ‘sandwich’ was usually filled with cold meat, that it was eaten at the highest echelons of the British establishment and that it was considered a supper or post-theatre dish which might be eaten long after dinner.

Yet Gibbon leaves many questions unanswered, including the basic one of how the sandwich got its name. How widely was it known outside this circle of ‘twenty or thirty’ men at the Cocoa-Tree? And for how long before 1762 had the sandwich been known as the sandwich?

Given the date of Gibbon’s diary entry, the likeliest time for the birth of Sandwich’s sandwich is 1748–51, during his first stint as First Lord of the Admiralty. At that time, Montagu was a famous thirty-something about town, rushed off his feet at work and linked to London club life through his connections with the notorious Hellfire club. During the 1750s, he separated from his wife, who had been declared insane, and for a while retreated to a quieter life at his estate, Hinchingbrooke in Huntingdonshire, where he had access to his own home-reared beef and a fine kitchen garden. It is likely that he sometimes ate cold beef between two slices of bread here too but, if so, there were few outside his household to take notice. For the ‘sandwich’ to take off among Gibbon and his circle by 1762, it seems likely that it was ordered by the earl in the gossipy world of London.

We will probably never know for sure. The most interesting question in any case is not the first time that John Montagu ate cold beef between bread but the first time that someone else, copying him, ordered ‘a sandwich’. They, and not he, were the inventor of the word in its current meaning. In the absence, however, of a hitherto unearthed contemporary chronicler recounting this moment, we are stuck with 1762 as the founding moment for the ‘sandwich’.

Orlando Montagu, a young entrepreneur and son of the current earl, has done the obvious thing and gone into the sandwich business. In 2003, with the conveniently named Robert Earl (the founder of 'Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Café'), Montagu founded Earl of Sandwich, a chain of restaurants with venues in Walt Disney World in Florida and Detroit Airport among many others. Earl of Sandwich sells hot ‘made-to-order’ sandwiches – the meat is all roasted and the bread is all baked fresh on the premises – with a ‘historical’ theme. ‘The sandwich you’d make if your name was on it’ reads a legend emblazoned on the walls.11 The menu includes the Full Montagu, the Earl’s Club Sandwich and ‘an original 1762’, harking back to Gibbon, which consists of hot roast beef with a slice of cheese and strong horseradish on warm bread. Though he shares his ancestor’s energy and drive, Orlando disagrees with him on the virtues of cold leftovers. ‘I think cold is bad. Cold food just doesn’t taste as good.’12 With this new family brand of hot sandwiches, Montagu is optimistically trying to reclaim ‘the sandwich with a capital “s”’.13 As the company tagline says, ‘The Original Sandwich since 1762’.

What, though, of sandwiches before 1762 – sandwiches avant la lettre? The earl cannot have been the first person who, wanting some cold meat and some bread, thought to place the one inside the other. Particularly in an era before the use of the fork, it would have been the neatest and most obvious way of eating bread and cheese or bread and meat without getting your fingers dirty. There is, however, a frustrating lack of evidence for sandwiches before 1762.

Some sources have suggested that the ancient Romans ate a kind of ‘sandwich-like’ snack called ‘offula’ or ‘ofellae’.14 These were certainly a kind of snack, and were eaten in taverns, but ‘sandwich-like’ is pushing it. Ofulla seems, rather, to have been an all-purpose term for snack, rather like ‘tapas’: sometimes they were morsels of marinated meat, sometimes starchy lumps of polenta; hardly a sandwich.

Another dead-end is the medieval trencher – large pieces of bread on which food was served. These have frequently been compared to sandwiches and one author of a book on sandwiches proposes that in the Middle Ages sandwiches ‘were known as trenchers’.15 It is undoubtedly true that, like sandwiches, trenchers were a form of bread used as a vehicle for eating other foods. There, however, the similarity ends. Unlike a sandwich, with a trencher, the meat and the bread were not eaten together. The trencher’s role was primarily that of an edible plate. At rich feasts, trenchers would be removed several times during the meal and replaced with fresh ones.16 The meat-soaked trencher would later be eaten by the servants. Eating someone else’s juice-soaked hunk of bread is not the same as eating your own sandwich.

A more plausible – and much older – candidate for the first sandwich is the Korech or ‘Hillel sandwich’, eaten as part of the Jewish Passover meal. In the first century BC Hillel the Elder (born circa 110 BC), a distinguished rabbi, created the custom of eating bitter herbs sandwiched together inside matzo bread, the herbs (maror) symbolizing the bitterness of slavery and the unleavened bread commemorating the hasty flatbreads made by the Israelites as they fled Egypt. In the Bible, Exodus 12:8, the rules of Passover state that ‘they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it’. According to the Haggadah, the Jewish religious text setting out the rules for the Seder meal, Hillel took the prescriptions of Exodus and Numbers and turned them into a living ritual. ‘This is what Hillel did when the Temple existed: He enwrapped the Paschal lamb, the matzo and the bitter herbs to eat them as one.’ In other words, he made a lamb-and-herb sandwich.

The matzo-maror sandwich is still eaten as part of the Passover meal, though today it is meatless (since no animal sacrifices could happen after the destruction of the Temple). The matzo is stuck together with sweet haroset – a nutty paste with many variants17 – plus a dollop of horseradish standing in for the bitter herbs, again to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. The haroset symbolizes the mortar used by the Israel – ite slaves as they laboured for the Egyptians – the matzo is the bricks. But haroset can also stand for the sweetness of freedom (in the past it sometimes meant blood). It was Hillel’s idea that Jews should taste the two flavours together, the bitter and the sweet, and the sandwich structure is the perfect vehicle for dissonant flavour combinations. In the modern version of the Korech, the horseradish and the haroset are sandwiched between two crisp slices of matzo cracker.

Hillel’s original sandwich would have been different. The first matzo was essentially just a soft flatbread, like chapatti or lavash. The original Passover sandwich was a kind of roast lamb and herb wrap, similar to a kebab, and probably very delicious. The fact that Hillel recommended eating the meat, herbs and bread together in this way suggests that ‘sandwiches’ of this kind had been eaten in the Middle East for a very long time. The ‘wrap’, which has become so popular in the past ten years in Britain, the US and elsewhere, is sometimes viewed as a Johnny-come-lately of sandwiches. The opposite, in fact, is true. The existence of Korech shows that meat and vegetables encased in flatbread is of antique origin.

The Passover sandwich of the first century BC summons up an entire family of stuffed flatbreads, stretching forwards to the houmous and falafel in pitta bread eaten today throughout the Middle East, the sesame flatbreads filled with k’nafeh of Lebanon, the Armenian lavash filled with cream cheese, mint and cucumber and many more. What makes Hillel’s sandwich so useful and striking for our purposes is that Hillel quite consciously and clearly introduced the notion of filling being wrapped or enclosed in bread. The word Korech derives from karach, meaning to encircle, embrace or surround. It is the same word used to denote the structure of bookbinding; as well as the enveloping of a shroud. This seems apposite. Bread in a sandwich can take on the role of a book’s cover (with the filling playing the role of the leaves) or it can be a shroud which protects and covers a body of filling within.

Structurally, Hillel’s sandwich is a true sandwich, the first on record. Culturally, however, it has no connection with the thing we call a ‘sandwich’. This family of Middle Eastern wraps have a lineage which is entirely separate from the European sandwich; and they lack a single name to unify them.

Returning to western Europe in the centuries before the fourth Earl of Sandwich, it is very hard to find any concrete reference to ingredients being placed within bread, as opposed to being eaten alongside, or on top of it. One possible pre-sandwich is the family of spread toasts of early modern Britain, which included such toppings as veal kidney mixed with egg yolks, scrambled eggs, melted cheese and anchovies.18 There is a reference supporting the notion of ‘toasts’ as precursor to the sandwich in The European Magazine of 1801. In a memoir of the actor Thomas Walker (1698–1744), a notorious drunk, we are told that he frequently had to eat snacks behind the scenes ‘to alleviate the fumes of the liquor’: these were ‘Sandwiches (or, as they were then called, anchovy toasts)’. But I cannot find any reference to anchovy toasts before 1762 having a top layer of bread (though an American recipe for ‘anchovy toasts’ from 1847 does speak of placing the anchovies ‘between the slices of toast’).19

More broadly, there is the whole category of ‘bread and something’. In an article in Gastronomica in 2004, Mark Morton argued that ‘The sandwich appears to have been simply known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese”.’20 Morton rightly notes that these two phrases are found throughout English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, the character of Nim announces, ‘I love not the humour of bread and cheese.’ Morton notes that ‘significantly’ the sequence of the phrase was always ‘bread and cheese’ not ‘cheese and bread’, which could be read to suggest that the bread was being used as the foundation for the cheese, as in a sandwich.

It is hard to argue with Morton’s case that ‘bread and cheese’ and ‘bread and meat’ were sometimes equivalent to the sandwich. But it is going too far to argue that ‘bread and cheese’ always meant a sandwich. Rather, then as now, ‘bread and cheese’ most likely meant just that – a hunk or roll of bread and a piece of cheese on a plate, which the eater could combine and eat as they saw fit. Many people must have combined cheese and bread into a ‘sandwich’. Others, however, may have chosen to spear their cheese on their knife and eat it that way, or placed the cheese on a single piece of bread without adding a top layer, or munched on alternate chunks of bread and cheese.

We still lack a concrete reference to cheese or anything else being sandwiched within slices of bread in western Europe before 1762. In an anti-papal tract of 1571, Spiritus est vicarious Christi in terra by John Northbrooke (fl. 1568–1579), I have found a fleeting allusion to bread and cheese which suggests an idea of containment. Northbrooke hysterically accuses Catholics of being ‘like to the Rat catchers, for they will take good bread, cheese and butter, and within wil put arsnecke & poison: the good bread & butter is nothing else but to allure than to eate the secrete & hidden poison, to their destruction’ (my italics).21 The insistence that the poison is ‘secrete and hidden’ and the idea of hiding poison within the bread, cheese and butter could be read to suggest a sandwich, which would be an excellent hiding place for poison. But this is no more than conjecture. It is equally possible that Northbrook is saying that the poison is secreted within the individual ingredients. Another contender is the portable ‘loaves’ mentioned in a cookbook of 1730 by Charles Carter (The Complete Practical Cook), but there are whole French loaves elaborately hollowed out and filled with meat (such as chicken or mutton) for travelling, rather than a basic sandwich in the earl’s sense.

So where is the sandwich avant la lettre? The historian Simon Schama has suggested that the Dutch belegde broodje predates the sandwich, and numerous histories of the sandwich have followed him on this point. The source is a travel book of 1673 by John Ray, Observations topographical, moral and physiological made in a journey through part of the low-countries. Among his observations on Dutch food – Ray is fascinated by a ‘green cheese, said to be coloured with the juice of sheep’s dung’ – Ray notes that, ‘You shall seldom fail of hung Beef in any Inn you come into, which they will cut into thin slices and eat with Bread and Butter, laying the slices upon the Butter.’22 This, argues Schama, shows that belegde broodje is of ‘greater antiquity than the sandwich’.23 Well, yes, except that what is being described is not a sandwich proper but an open sandwich. Ray does not say that the Dutch innkeepers added a second slice of bread of top of the meat.

As in Britain, this lack of evidence is not evidence that sandwiches were not eaten. You have only to look at the Dutch still-life paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about which Schama writes so brilliantly, to feel sure that cheese, meat or fish stuffed into crusty bread was a basic Dutch meal. Schama writes of the ingredients of the classic still-life meal: ‘(not necessarily breakfast): a wedge of cheese, a loaf of bread, a herring, the ubiquitous lemon, a scattering of nuts and fruit, a roemer of Rhenish or a tankard of ale’. When you look at such paintings, the herring is begging to be crammed into the bread with a sharp squeeze of lemon. Or consider Still Life with Roemer, Shrimp and Roll from 1646 by Pieter Claesz. (c. 1597–circa 1661), another invitation to sandwich-making. We see a glowing glass of white wine, a crusty roll and a dish of little pink prawns. How would you eat these prawns if not in the bread? Or Still Life with Ham by Gerret Willemz. Heda (c. 1620–1702): a pink and white cooked ham on a white tablecloth with a crusty roll and some mustard. With such ingredients to hand, it would be perverse not to smear the mustard inside the roll with a slice of ham.24


Nevertheless, we are forced to acknowledge that before 1762, sandwiches in Europe elude the historical record, which sends us back to the conundrum of what exactly was so distinctive about the fourth earl’s behaviour that he should have given his name to this basic method of eating? The answer, I would propose, is that what was new about John Montagu’s sandwich – and we cannot entirely discount Grosley’s reference to it as a ‘new dish’ in 1765/1770 – was not the fact that he ate it but the fact that he called for it ready-made. Countless anonymous others must have constructed their own sandwiches from a plate of bread and meat over the thousands of years that bread and meat were eaten. But only aristocratic Montagu – too busy to leave his desk – asked for the bread and meat to be assembled in advance on his behalf, so that he would not have to stop work for even a moment. It was not the eating that was novel but the ordering. This would explain, too, how it took on his name. At venues such as the Cocoa-Tree, word would have spread fast that Montagu was ordering his cold meat ready-to-eat between two slices of bread. In this sense, he was an innovator after all, who transformed the sandwich from a humble snack into a luxury convenience food.

In 'The Old Curiosity Shop', Charles Dickens gives a little glimpse of how cumbersome sandwich-eating could have been before 1762 (and indeed continued to be in many working-class inns). The character of Kit, starving hungry, carries ‘a large slice of bread and a mug of beer into a corner’ and proceeds to make himself a sandwich. But in ‘despatching his bread and meat’, Kit manages to ‘swallow two-thirds of his knife at every mouthful’. Finally, he ‘incapacitated himself for further conversation by taking a most prodigious sandwich at one bite’.25 Dickens summons up how messy and laborious it could be turning ‘bread and meat’ into a sandwich if you had to do it yourself.

By contrast, Sandwich’s pre-fab sandwich was a neat thing, an architectural wonder, a meal that needed no cutlery, and yet left busy fingers free of grease. It is indeed a great invention.


NOTES

1 Larousse Gastronomique (London, 2001) p. 1038.

2 Charles Lamb refers to this epigram in a letter dated 20 January 1825 to Sarah Hutchinson.

3 Woody Allen, Getting Even (New York, 1971).

4 Alan Davidson, ‘Le sandwich d’un joueur’, in Le Dossier: Casse-Croute: aliment portative, repas indéfinissale, ed. Julia Csergo (Paris, 2001).

5 N.A.M. Rodger, The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792) (London, 1993), p. 79.

6 Ibid., p. 79.

7 Ibid., p. 319.

8 Conversation with the author (July 2009).

9 Charlotte Mason, The Lady’s assistant for regulating and supplying her table; containing one hundred and fifty select bills of fare (1773), p. 125.

10 Philip B. Dodd, The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium: Encounters with the Heroes of the English Language (London, 2007), pp. 166–7.

11 Ibid., p. 159; www.earlofsandwichusa.com, accessed April 2010.

12 Interview with the author (July 2009).

13 Dodd, Reverend Guppy, p. 165.

14 Charles Panati, Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (New York, 1987), p. 400.

15 Gwen Robyns, The Book of Sandwiches (London and Sydney, 1984), p. 10.

16 Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurtur for Men Servants (London, 1560).

17 Susan Weingarten, ‘Haroset’ in Authenticity in the Kitchen: Proceedings on the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 200J (Totnes, 2006), p. 414.

18 C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to Recent Times (London, 1973), p. 265.

19 Eliza Leslie, The Lady’s Receipt-Book (Philadelphia, 1847), p. 29.

20 Mark Morton, ‘Bread and Meat for God’s Sake’, Gastronomica (Summer 2004), p. 6.

21 John Northbrooke, Spiritus est vicarious Christi in terra (London, 1571).

22 John Ray, Observations Topographical, Moral and Physiological made in a Journey through part of the Low-Countries (London, 1673), p. 51.

23 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London, 1987), p. 157.

24 For reproductions of these pictures see Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose, Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life (Albany, NY, 2002).

25 Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1840), vol. I, chapter I.


Written by Bee Wilson in "Sandwhich - A Global History", Reaktion Books, London, UK,2010, chapter one. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.