Sandwich

A sandwich is food, typically meat, cheese or vegetables, placed between two slices of bread. It is named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. According to a popular story recorded in the 1760s, he asked for meat between slices of bread so that he could eat without leaving the gaming table, or, in other versions, his desk.^[1] Others then began to order “the same as Sandwich”, and the name stuck.

Sandwich, the town

The Earl took his title from Sandwich, a small town in Kent in south-east England. The town's name is much older and comes from Old English words meaning a sandy harbour or market town. The town is therefore named after sand, the earl after the town and the food after the earl, which makes a sandwich, by descent, a kind of sand.^[2]

The Hawaiian Islands were also named the Sandwich Islands by Captain James Cook in 1778, after the same earl. The name did not last. The food did, which says something about what people remember.

Before the sandwich

People had of course been putting food between pieces of bread for a very long time before the 1760s. The Earl did not invent the sandwich; he simply had his name attached to it, which historians agree is the more reliable way of becoming famous.

• Bread, filling, bread: sandwich.
• Bread, filling: open sandwich, or toast with ambitions.
• Filling, bread, filling: a committee decision.

See also

• Sand – its ultimate namesake
• Toaster – a related device
• Meeting – where sandwiches are traditionally served

References

1. Earl, E. (1762/1999). The Same as Sandwich. Fictional reprint.
2. Harbour, S. (2005). “Sand, Town, Earl, Lunch”. Place-Name Notes 4: 1.
3. Crust, C. (2011). Before the Earl. Bakery Books.