A sandwich is a food typically consisting of vegetables, sliced cheese or meat, placed on or

between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein two or more pieces of bread serve as a
container or wrapper for another food type. The sandwich began as a portable finger food in
the Western world, though over time it has become prevalent worldwide.
Sandwiches are a popular type of lunch food, taken to work, school, or picnics to be eaten as part of
a packed lunch. The bread may be plain or be coated with condiments, such
as mayonnaise or mustard, to enhance its flavour and texture. As well as being homemade,
sandwiches are also widely sold in restaurants and can be served hot or cold.[4][5] There are both
savoury sandwiches, such as deli meat sandwiches, and sweet sandwiches, such as a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich.
The sandwich is named after its supposed inventor, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. The Wall
Street Journal has described it as Britain's "biggest contribution to gastronomy".

History
The modern concept of a sandwich using slices of bread as found within the West can arguably be
traced to 18th-century Europe. However, the use of some kind of bread or bread-like substance to lie
under (or under and over) some other food, or used to scoop up and enclose or wrap some other
type of food, long predates the eighteenth century, and is found in numerous much older cultures
worldwide.
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. 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.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, thick slabs of coarse and usually stale bread, called "trenchers",
were used as plates. 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 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.
Initially perceived as food that men shared while gaming and drinking at night, the sandwich slowly
began appearing in polite society as a late-night meal among the aristocracy. The sandwich's
popularity in Spain and England increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, when the rise
of industrial society and the working classes made fast, portable, and inexpensive meals essential In
London, for example, at least seventy street vendors were selling ham sandwiches by 1850; during
that decade sandwich bars also became an important form of eating establishment in western
Holland, typically serving liver and salt beef sandwiches
In the United States, the sandwich was first promoted as an elaborate meal at supper. By the early
twentieth century, as bread became a staple of the American diet, the sandwich became the same
kind of popular, quick meal as was already widespread in the Mediterranean

Language
The first written usage of the English word appeared in Edward Gibbon's journal, in longhand,
referring to "bits of cold meat" as a "Sandwich". It was named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of
Sandwich, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. It is said that he ordered his valet to bring him
meat tucked between two pieces of bread, and others began to order "the same as Sandwich!" It is
commonly said that Lord Sandwich was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue
playing cards, particularly cribbage, while eating, without using a fork, and without getting his cards
greasy from eating meat with his bare hands
The rumour in its familiar form appeared in Pierre-Jean Grosley's Londres (Neuchâtel, 1770),
translated as A Tour to London in 1772 Grosley's impressions had been formed during a year in
London in 1765. The sober alternative is provided by Sandwich's biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, who
suggests Sandwich's commitments to the navy, and to politics and the arts, mean the first sandwich
was more likely to have been consumed at his desk.
Before being known as sandwiches, this food combination seems to simply have been known as
"bread and meat" or "bread and cheese". These two phrases are found throughout English drama
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In the United States, a court in Boston, Massachusetts, ruled in 2006 that a sandwich includes at
least two slices of bread and "under this definition, this court finds that the term 'sandwich' is not
commonly understood to include burritos, tacos, and quesadillas, which are typically made with a
single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans." The issue stemmed from the
question of whether a restaurant that sold burritos could move into a shopping centre where another
restaurant had a no-compete clause in its lease prohibiting other "sandwich" shops.
In Spain, where the word sandwich is borrowed from the English language it refers to a food item
made with English sandwich bread It is otherwise known as a bocadillo. Similar usage applies in
other Spanish-speaking cultures, such as Mexico, where the word torta is also used for a popular
variety of roll-type sandwiches.
In the United Kingdom and Australia, the term sandwich is more narrowly defined than in the United
States: it refers only to an item which uses sliced bread from a loaf.An item with similar fillings, but
using an entire bread roll cut horizontally in half, is always referred to as a roll. (In South Australia,
there is a regional variant of the roll, superficially similar to a club sandwich, where the bread roll is
sliced three times with parallel cuts, and filling is put in the first and third openings, but not the
second. This makes the resulting double cut roll easier to handle: the top half and the bottom half
are eaten separately.) Any hot item based on a bread roll is referred to as a burger, never as
a sandwich. However, hot sliced (not ground) beef between two slices of toasted bread is referred to
as a steak sandwich: it is the sliced loaf bread that distinguishes the steak sandwich from a burger.
The verb to sandwich has the meaning "to position anything between two other things of a different
character, or to place different elements alternately," and the noun sandwich has related meanings
derived from this more general definition. For example, an ice cream sandwich consists of a layer of
ice cream between two layers of cake or biscuit. Similarly, Oreos and Custard Creams are described
as sandwich biscuits (UK/Commonwealth) or sandwich cookies (US) because they consist of a soft
filling between the baked layers
The word butty (a reference to the fact that butter is often used in British sandwiches) is common in
some northern parts of England as a slang synonym for "sandwich", particularly to refer to certain
kinds of sandwiches including the chip butty, bacon butty, or sausage butty. Sarnie is a similar
colloquialism The colloquial Scottish word piece may refer either to a sandwich or to a light meal,
especially one that includes a sandwich. For example, the phrase jeely piece refers to a jam
sandwich.

Pre-made sandwiches
It has been suggested that UK's first pre-made packaged sandwiches were sold by Marks &
Spencer in 1980. As they proved wildly popular, a small experiment involving five stores rapidly grew
to cover more than one hundred stores. Within a year, the store was looking for ways to manufacture
sandwiches at an industrial scale. However, the first pre-packed sandwiches date from well before
this. British Home Stores sold pre-packed sandwiches in the 1960s (see the Radio Times 3
November 2018 p. 167), and earlier even than that, Marks and Spencer (Brighton branch) began
selling them in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s in the Oxford Street branch, London. (See the
Radio Times 10 November 2018 p. 160)
In 2017, the sandwich industry made and sold £8 billion in sandwiches in the UK alone.