The sandwich was officially invented sometime in the early 1760s by an Englishman, John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who requested his servants bring him food between two slices of bread instead of on a plate so he could hold his meal in one hand and continue either gambling or working very hard as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty (depending on which version of the story you choose to believe). Sandwich’s sandwich was salt beef on toast. It is unrecorded whether any condiments were involved or if he just ate it plain and dry and sad.
It’s likely it didn’t take an aristocrat to figure out that you could put meat between slices of bread and have a quick, decent, and portable meal, but of course the earl got the credit. That’s England for you.
In America, we do things differently. We have reinvented the sandwich in our own image. Our sandwiches are so full of meat and cheese and vegetables and condiments that we need two hands to hold them—and still we often dribble their contents onto our shirts. They are big and expansive, like our Manifest Destiny. Some of them are so expansive, we sell them by the foot.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Takeout
