Sandwiches inspire many questions: What’s the correct way to cut a sandwich? How much should a sandwich cost? And who invented the sandwich? Whether you favor a classic white bread and tomato sandwich or a buttery peanut butter sandwich, we can all agree that the sandwich is one of the greatest innovations of human history. However, the exact origin of putting food between two pieces of bread is much less clear. The most popular story about the birth of the sandwich credits the concept to the 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, an 18th-century British aristocrat.
Allegedly, Montagu, an avid gambler, would ask his servants to put his meat between two slices of bread so he could dine without interrupting his cribbage games. While the gambling-obsessed, meat-loving earl did give the sandwich its name, he did not invent the concept of putting food in between slices of bread. Who really invented the sandwich is pretty much impossible to say, and also depends on how you define a sandwich (a subject of hot debate to this day). However, there’s clear evidence of humans combining food and bread in a sandwich-like manner long before the Earl’s day.
The history of sandwiches
Some of the first documented evidence of humans eating something resembling a sandwich dates back to the first century B.C., when the Jewish Rabbi Hillel the Elder is said to have wrapped bitter herbs in unleavened matzo. This sounds delicious, but it’s really more like a wrap. In a similar vein, filled flatbreads were a popular snack across the Persian and Ottoman empires thousands of years before the Earl of Sandwich was born in 1718. If you’re of the camp that a sandwich requires sliced, leavened bread, you might look to the “trenchers” of the European Middle Ages — basically, stale bread used as a dinner plate. Closer to the Earl of Sandwich’s era, “bread and meat” and “bread and cheese” are mentioned throughout 16th- and 17th-century English dramatic works.
Considering human nature, the sandwich is probably about as old as bread, which is to say over 10,000 years old (again, depending on how you define bread). Although the Earl of Sandwich definitely did not invent the sandwich, he did help popularize and solidify the concept, and he achieved immortality by having a food named after him. Sandwiches have only been going by their current name for less than 300 years, but a sandwich by any other name is still delicious. No matter how you slice it, humans have been enjoying sandwiches for thousands of years, and if we’re lucky, we’ll keep slapping food between pieces of bread for thousands of years to come.
