The Earl of Sandwich, and why he probably didn't invent it
Every history of the sandwich begins with John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century British nobleman who supposedly asked his cook to bring him meat between two slices of bread so he could eat without leaving the gambling table. The story is charming. It is also almost certainly wrong.
The earliest version of the anecdote appears in Tour to London (1772), a travel book by the French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley. Grosley described an unnamed minister of state who, during a 24-hour gambling marathon, ate only beef between bread. The minister was widely understood to be Montagu, who had a reputation for both cards and long working hours. But here is the thing: Montagu's biographer, N.A.M. Rodger, has argued persuasively that the Earl was far more likely to have come up with the idea while working through long hours at his desk at the Admiralty. Sandwich was First Lord of the Admiralty during the American Revolution. He was busy. He needed to eat without stopping. The gambling story is sexier, so it stuck.
What the Earl unquestionably did was lend his name. He did not invent the food. People had been wrapping food in bread for thousands of years. He just made it fashionable enough in London society that it acquired his title, the way a cardigan got named after another earl who liked wearing one.
Bread as utensil
Long before England had earls, humans were using bread as a kind of edible plate. The Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder, in the 1st century BCE, is credited with the practice of wrapping the Passover lamb in unleavened bread with bitter herbs, a literal sandwich, eaten as part of the seder. In medieval Europe, the trencher was a thick slab of stale bread used as a plate to soak up juices from meat and stew. After the meal, the trencher (now soaked in fat and broth) was either eaten by the diner, given to the dogs, or distributed to the poor.
In the Arab world, flatbreads have been used to wrap meat for at least a millennium. The shawarma, the döner, the gyro, these are all variations of a much older idea, predating the British nobility by centuries. In Mexico, the taco is a sandwich-adjacent food with pre-Columbian roots. In China, the roujiamo, a stuffed flatbread sometimes called the "Chinese hamburger", has been documented since at least the Qin dynasty (3rd century BCE).
The sandwich, in other words, is a near-universal human invention. The Earl just got the trademark.
The industrial lunch
The sandwich as we know it, handheld, portable, designed for eating away from home, was a creation of the Industrial Revolution. Before the 19th century, most people ate their main meal at home in the middle of the day. Factory work changed that. Workers needed food they could carry to the mill, eat in fifteen minutes during a break, and consume without plates, cutlery, or sit-down service.
Bread filled with cold meat, cheese, or jam was the obvious solution. Working-class women across Britain, France, Germany, and the eastern United States packed lunch pails for husbands and sons every morning, and the pail invariably contained a sandwich. The Cornish pasty, while not technically a sandwich, served the same role for tin miners, portable lunch, edible casing, no utensils required.
The rise of pre-sliced bread in the 1920s, Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine debuted in 1928 in Chillicothe, Missouri, accelerated everything. Suddenly anyone could make a sandwich in thirty seconds. School lunches, office lunches, picnic lunches: the sandwich became the default American midday meal almost overnight.
The American deli explosion
While the British were politely cutting crusts off cucumber sandwiches, immigrant communities in American cities were inventing something much more interesting. Jewish delicatessens in New York's Lower East Side, opening in the late 19th century, transformed the sandwich into a meal of operatic excess. The Reuben (corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss, Russian dressing on rye) is the canonical example, though its origin is disputed between Omaha and Manhattan.
Italian immigrants brought the hero, the grinder, the sub, the hoagie, names varying by city for essentially the same thing: a long roll stuffed with cured meats, cheese, oil, vinegar, and vegetables. New Orleans got the muffuletta from Sicilian immigrants. Philadelphia got the cheesesteak. Tampa got the Cubano. Maine got the lobster roll.
By the 1950s, every American city had its sandwich. Chicago had the Italian beef. Buffalo had the beef on weck. New Orleans had the po' boy. The sandwich became regional in a way that few other foods did, each city's version a marker of local identity, defended with fierce loyalty.
The fast food revolution
McDonald's, Burger King, and their imitators turned the hamburger, a sandwich, by the broad definition, into the dominant prepared food on Earth. By 1970, more sandwiches were being eaten in America than any other single category of food. Subway, founded in 1965 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, took the concept further: a fully customizable sandwich made in front of you, in under three minutes, for under three dollars. By 2010 it was the largest restaurant chain in the world by location count.
Fast food sandwiches standardized something that had always been local. The Big Mac in Tokyo tastes the same as the Big Mac in Tucson. This was either a triumph of consistency or a tragedy of homogenization, depending on your politics.
Global cross-pollination
The last thirty years have been the era of the international sandwich. The Vietnamese bánh mì, itself a colonial-era hybrid of French baguette and Vietnamese fillings, became a global phenomenon in the 2000s. The Japanese katsu sando crossed over from convenience-store curiosity to high-end gastronomic object. The Mexican torta, the Argentine choripán, the South African gatsby, the Indian vada pav, all began appearing on menus far from their cities of origin.
Food culture in the 21st century moves in both directions. American chain sandwiches export to Asia. Asian street sandwiches import to America. The earl, if he could see what his name now contains, would not recognize most of it. He probably would not eat most of it. But he would, almost certainly, agree that you can still play cards while eating one.