Sandwich

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The sandwich went before a court in Indiana in 2024, and the court ruled that "tacos and burritos are Mexican-style sandwiches." That is a surprising verdict for a food most people feel sure they can recognize. At its simplest, a sandwich is a filling placed between slices of bread, or laid on top of one. It began as a portable, convenient food in the Western world and later spread across the globe. Yet the edges of the category are still argued over in courtrooms, in government manuals and on social media. Where did this idea come from, long before anyone used the word? Who was the man whose title became the name? Why do laws disagree about what counts? And how did a lunchtime staple grow into a business worth billions of pounds?

  20192

• 2. Bread Before Sandwiches

  ›

  In the first century BC, the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder is said to have wrapped meat from the Paschal lamb and bitter herbs inside a soft matzah during Passover. Matzah is flat, unleavened bread, so the result resembled a modern wrap made with flatbread. Many cultures have used bread or something like it to sit beneath food, to scoop it up or to enclose it.

  During the Middle Ages in Europe, diners ate from trenchers, which were thick slabs of coarse and usually stale bread. At the tables of the wealthy, the food-soaked trencher was handed to a dog or to beggars after the meal. Diners in more modest circumstances ate the trencher themselves.

  In English plays of the 16th and 17th centuries, the food combination that we now call a sandwich appears under plainer names. The phrases were "bread and meat" and "bread and cheese."

  The closest ancestor with a direct link to the English sandwich turned up in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. There the naturalist John Ray saw beef hanging from the rafters of taverns. He reported that people cut it into thin slices and ate it "with bread and butter laying the slices upon the butter." The detail he felt he had to spell out shows that the Dutch open-faced belegde broodje was still unfamiliar to English readers. England would soon have its own version, filled with roast beef.

  11121314

• 3. The Earl and the Cards

  ›

  John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was an eighteenth-century English aristocrat, and his title gave the food its name. At first the sandwich was seen as something men shared while gaming and drinking at night. Only slowly did it appear in polite society, as a late-night meal among the aristocracy.

  The familiar story places the Earl at long sessions of cribbage and other card games in public gambling houses. He is said to have told his valet to bring roast beef between two pieces of toasted bread. The meal let him keep playing without a fork, and it kept the grease of bare-handed meat off his cards. From there the dish grew popular in London, and the Earl's name stuck to it. The Wall Street Journal has called the sandwich Britain's "biggest contribution to gastronomy."

  The tale in its well-known form appeared in Pierre-Jean Grosley's book Londres, published in Neuchâtel in 1770. It was translated as A Tour to London in 1772. Grosley formed his impressions during a year in London in 1765.

  The Earl's biographer, Nicholas A. M. Rodger, offers a duller alternative. Montagu was committed to the Royal Navy, to politics and to the arts. Rodger suggests that the first sandwich was more likely eaten at his desk than at a card table.

  169183334

• 4. Fast Food for a Working Class

  ›

  By 1850, at least seventy street vendors in London were selling ham sandwiches. The nineteenth century had brought industrial society and a growing working class, and both needed meals that were fast, portable and cheap. That demand drove the sandwich's popularity up dramatically across England.

  The same decade saw sandwich bars become an important kind of eating place in western Holland. Their menus typically featured liver and salt beef sandwiches.

  In the United States the sandwich began differently, promoted as an elaborate meal for supper. By the early 20th century, bread had become a staple of the American diet. The sandwich then turned into the same kind of popular, quick meal that was already widespread around the Mediterranean.

  3317189

• 5. Lunchbox Habits

  ›

  A packed lunch carried to work, to school or on a picnic is where many people meet the sandwich. Bread is often spread with mayonnaise or mustard, which adds flavour and texture. It can also be served plain, and a sandwich with no spread is called "dry."

  Sandwiches are made at home, and they are also sold widely through retail outlets, either hot or cold. Savoury versions, such as deli meat sandwiches, make up the majority. Sweet ones form a category of their own, including jam sandwiches and the fluffernutter.

  21833

• 6. Counting Sandwiches

  ›

  In the United States, the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration are the agencies that set a regulatory definition. The USDA calls a closed sandwich one with at least 35% cooked meat and no more than 50% bread. An open sandwich needs at least 50% cooked meat. Yet the same USDA manual labels burritos and fajitas "sandwich-like" and frankfurters "sandwich type." It explicitly excludes stromboli.

  Online, the debate has centred on whether a hot dog or an open sandwich qualifies. Hamburgers and burritos were also pulled into the argument.

  The British Sandwich Association takes a looser view. It defines a sandwich as "any form of bread with a filling, generally assembled cold." That wording takes in wraps and bagels, but it may leave out hot dishes such as burgers.

  A Massachusetts court ruled in 2006 that a sandwich needs at least two slices of bread. The court found that the term is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla. The case began with a burrito restaurant that wanted to move into a shopping centre. Another tenant held a no-compete clause barring other "sandwich" shops.

  The US state of New York writes its definition more broadly. It explicitly includes burritos, gyros, hot dogs, wraps and pita sandwiches.

  The Indiana court's 2024 reasoning went further than tacos and burritos. It said the same definition would reach a restaurant serving made-to-order Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps or Vietnamese banh mi.

  20192152

• 7. Words for Sandwich

  ›

  In Spain, the word sandwich is borrowed from English, and it names a food made with English sandwich bread. Anything else is a bocadillo. Mexico offers the torta, a word used for a popular kind of roll-type sandwich.

  Britain and Australia define the word more narrowly than the United States does. It usually means sliced loaf bread. The same fillings in a whole bread roll cut in half are generally called a roll, or with certain hot fillings, a burger. Australia has one twist. Hot sliced beef between two slices of toasted bread is a steak sandwich, because the sliced loaf separates it from a burger.

  The verb to sandwich means to position something between two things of a different character. That sense gave us the ice cream sandwich, a layer of ice cream between cake or biscuit. Oreos and Custard creams are sandwich biscuits in the UK and Commonwealth, and sandwich cookies in the US. In corporate finance, the Dutch Sandwich and the Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich are names for tax evasion schemes.

  Slang adds more. In parts of England and Wales, butty began as a word for a buttered slice of bread. It now covers the chip butty, the bacon butty and the sausage butty. Sarnie is a similar colloquialism, and Australians say sanger. In Scotland, a piece can mean a sandwich or a light meal, and a jeely piece is a jam sandwich.

  The Southeastern United States says "sammich," or sometimes "sammidge." In Japanese, the word is sando or sandoichi.

  2223242830

• 8. Chilled and Boxed

  ›

  Until the 1970s in Britain, sandwiches often sat unwrapped until someone bought them. They dried up and their edges curled. Sandwiches had been widely sold in cafes, railway stations, pubs and diners since the invention of sliced bread in the 1920s. Railway cafes and buffets, including those on trains, were so notorious for stale ones that people used "British Rail sandwich" as a satirical term.

  In 1979, the store chain Marks & Spencer introduced a small range of chilled, pre-made sandwiches. They were sold in wedge-shaped boxes, sealed to stay fresh. The range began as an experiment in five stores. Customers liked it, and it quickly grew to cover more than one hundred stores. Within a year, the company was looking for ways to make sandwiches on an industrial scale.

  By the end of that decade, the British sandwich industry was worth £1 billion. In 2017, British makers sold £8 billion worth of sandwiches.

  34103233