BY K IMBERLY K IRCHNER
If the legend is to be believed, what we know as a sandwich was born out of one man’s crippling gambling addiction. The man was John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, who was rumored to spend hours upon hours playing cards. During one of these marathon cribbage sessions, the story goes, the Earl asked his cook to prepare him a meal he could eat at the card table, which wouldn’t require the use of a fork and knife, but also wouldn’t cause him to dirty his fingers and potentially damage his cards. The cook’s solution was a piece of salt beef between two pieces of toasted bread. The tale spread quickly in Britain’s gossip-hungry high society, and the name Sandwich became synonymous with the increasingly popular bread based creation. The story was so prevalent, it was included as fact in French writer
Pierre-Jean Grosley’s travelogue, A Tour of London: “A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorpt in play that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game,” Grosley wrote. “This new dish grew
highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister who invented it.” In reality, the Earl was serving as a Cabinet minister during the time of Grosley’s travels, and it is highly unlikely he had the time to spend full days at the gambling table. Evidence does suggest that he was devoted to his job and of-
ten spent long hours hard at work at his desk — circumstances that could also have caused him to seek out a quick, one-handed meal. Of course, “dedicated government employee” doesn’t have quite the salacious appeal of “hopeless gambling addict,” so Sandwich’s legendary cribbage snack became the accepted origin story for the modern culinary favorite.
Drink & Dine Summer 2021 | Saturday, May 29, 2021
Salt beef and scandal The (allegedly) unseemly origins of the sandwich
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