Don’t we all just love a good sandwich? Is there a more convenient comfort food. Among all the inventions which have made our life easier over the years, the sandwich is bound to be near the top.
Who can escape the allure and convenience of smoked turkey ham with some mustard sauce wrapped with two slices of bread?
Even the humble peanut butter and jam sandwich can fill your stomach and mind up with happiness.
There aren’t any complicated recipes involved in the making of a marvellous meaty sandwich. It’s as simple as taking your choice of cold cut, putting some veggies, layering some spread and wrapping them up with two pieces of bread.
The fastest way to attain a state of gastronomical utopia. The sandwich might be the perfect food: portable, open to any interpretation and as simple or as elaborate as the mood permits.
The sandwich has a long and illustrious history, with lots and lots of different iterations being immortalized with the passage of time.
Today however, we’ll take you to its genesis and find out how this Big Bang of convenience, taste and nutrition occurred.
The sandwich as we know it was popularized in England in 1762 by John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Legend has it, and most food historians agree, that Montagu had a substantial gambling problem that led him to spend hours on end at the card table.
During a particularly long binge, he asked the house cook to bring him something he could eat without getting up from his seat, and the sandwich was born.
Montagu enjoyed his meat and bread so much that he ate it constantly, and as the concoction grew popular in London society circles, it also took on the Earl’s name.
Of course, John Montagu (or rather, his nameless cook) was hardly the first person to think of putting fillings between slices of bread.
In fact, we know exactly where Montagu first got the idea for his creation. Montagu travelled abroad to the Mediterranean, where Turkish and Greek mezze platters were served. Dips, cheeses, and meats were all “sandwiched” between and on layers of bread.
In all likelihood, Montagu took inspiration from these when he sat at that card table.
Montagu’s creation took off immediately. Just a few months later, a man named Edward Gibbon mentioned the sandwich by name in a diary entry, writing that he’d seen “twenty or thirty of the first men of the kingdom” in a restaurant eating them.
By the Revolutionary War, the sandwich was well established in England. Onwards, there was no stopping the sandwich, it spread all over the world. It became as ubiquitous in kids’ lunch boxes as an eraser in their stationery boxes.
Delis and Fast food chains created and immortalized many types of sandwiches which we all know and love.
John Montagu gambled, and we all won!
Go on now, explore the vast array of Cold Cuts with Licious and make yourself a delicious sandwich.