sandwich, in its basic form, slices of meat, cheese, or other food placed between two slices of bread. Although this mode of consumption must be as old as meat and bread, the name was adopted only in the 18th century for John Montagu, 4th earl of Sandwich.
Early sandwiches and sandwich-like foods
The use of some kind of bread or bread-like substance to lie under some other food, or to scoop it up and enclose or wrap it, is found in many cultures historically. Before being known as a “sandwich”, this food combination seems to have been known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese”.[8] These two phrases are found throughout English drama from the 16th and 17th centuries.[8]
In the first century BCE, the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder is said to have wrapped meat from the Paschal lamb and bitter herbs in a soft matzah—flat, unleavened bread—during Passover in the manner of a modern wrap made with flatbread.[11] Flat breads of only slightly varying kinds have long been used to scoop or wrap small amounts of food en route from platter to mouth throughout Western Asia and northern Africa. From Morocco to Ethiopia to India, bread is usually baked in flat rounds, contrasting with the European loaf tradition.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, thick slabs of coarse and usually stale bread, called “trenchers,” were used as plates.[12] After a meal, the food-soaked trencher was fed to a dog or to beggars at the tables of the wealthy, and eaten by diners in more modest circumstances. The immediate culinary precursor with a direct connection to the English sandwich was to be found in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, where the naturalist John Ray observed[13][14] that in the taverns beef hung from the rafters “which they cut into thin slices and eat with bread and butter laying the slices upon the butter”—explanatory specifications that reveal the Dutch belegde broodje, open-faced sandwich, was as yet unfamiliar in England.
