A Lesbian Lost in the Woods

fortooate

i refuse to believe the obvious fact that sandwiches weren’t a mode of food construction for the vast majority of human history because i hate thinking about it. it’s so obvious. i need to yell at my distant ancestors about how they’re using bread suboptimally

mormonfries

Counterpoint: they figured out dumplings pretty early which are basically just improved sandwiches which take a lil longer but then you make em in batches and it all works out

mormonfries

To expand on this: in order for sandwiches to really work in practice you have to have efficient refrigeration and quick heating, both easily accessible, for small batches of sandwich toppings. For most of history, most food would have been cooked and stored in large batches to prevent spoiling, which is ideal for dumplings but not for sandwiches. Hence the early development of sandwiches as convenience foods for the wealthy. The economic conditions were not sufficient for mass ensandwichment until less than a couple centuries ago

ariaste

mmmmmmmmm I don’t think i agree with the last person. We’ve been smoking and preserving meats for A WHILE, for example. Same with cheese. Those both let you you just shave off a couple bits, slap them on some bread, and be good to go. Same with pickles (and pickle variants, like saurkraut). You make a big jar, yeah, but you don’t use the jar all at once. Same with garum, aka Roman ketchup.

vorpalgirl

Ooh! Ooh! @ariaste I actually know this one!!

I was literally reading just today, a book about history that, funnily enough, tangentially mentioned the Earl of Sandwich, and it actually clarified he IS NOT thought to have “invented" the ….idea of sticking food between a couple slices of bread (which….should probably be obvious in hindsight but him “inventing” the practice is such a common cultural myth that it’s easy to forget how silly the idea really is, huh?).

It’s more that he became SO well known for doing so habitually as a matter of personal convenience (most famously for wanting to play cards and eat at the same time, but probably also in other situations), that the practice wound up nicknamed after him in English, to the extent that we eventually just…called it that, I guess? Especially since apparently it became ~fashionable~ to do it like he did, among the British aristocracy, around that time.

So…what did we call it before then? Well, I’ll be a tad lazy here and use wikipedia’s quotes on the matter, from the article on “Sandwich”:

Before being known as sandwiches, this food combination seems to simply have been known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese”.^[6] These two phrases are found throughout English drama from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[6]

In other words, it “seems” to at least some historians like we had them for a quite a while before him, we just didn’t have a specific singular noun for the style of food in English, until the Earl of Sandwich came along.

In fact, the same article notes that the same or very similar concept was found in numerous cultures around the world:

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.^[9]

I’d also like to point out this, which might go a long way to explaining why it FEELS like we “didn’t invent” the sandwich as we know it, until recent centuries…namely that the format the Earl of Sandwich used (two slices of thicker, leavened bread, with food stuff between it) works a lot better with the kind of bread Europeans eventually took to favoring, while a lot of the world prefers or preferred unleavened flatbread which is WAY easier to use in a similar manner:

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 baked in flat rounds, contrasting with the European loaf tradition.

(So basically, wraps have always existed probably, since we invented bread lol)

Additionally, the article mentions at some times and places in European history, they literally straight up used stale or low-quality bread slices as an edible plate (apparently called a “trencher”?), which is pretty much an open-faced sandwich if you ask me? And there’s also this assertion:

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^[11]^[12] 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.

So what have I learned today about sandwiches?

tldr:

Plenty of our ancestors used bread in ways that either were, or were VERY similar to the sandwich, or failing that, an open-faced sandwich, or a wrap. They’ve been doing it for arguably millenia! The Earl of Sandwich just got a couple of those things named after him in English language usage, because he made it come into ~vogue~ as a convenience meal type among the UK’s aristocracy and also probably because English (a fairly young language at the time, mind) didn’t have a distinct, separate noun for the practice yet.

That, and relatively modern, European “loaf style” bread is more conducive to the kind of sandwich the Earl of Sandwich liked, compared to flatbreads, which are much better for making wraps and also much more common in human cultures, especially if you go further back in history..

A Lesbian Lost in the Woods

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.