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Folks look up a food publication or log onto a website on the topic expect odes to unheard of delicacies and paeans to rare wines. Scrumptious as they all undoubtedly are, let’s put fine dining and gourmet delights aside for a while, and talk about that most ubiquitous of food items: the sandwich. At the risk of being considered plebian, I do declare that for me, a homemade sandwich, even one made with leftovers (veggies or meat) and a little mayonnaise is, short of a strong drink, the ultimate pick me up. Not exactly waistline friendly, but excellent comfort food all the same.
History tells us that the sandwich got its name from the Earl of Sandwich, but we shall come to that later because the concept itself is much older. The first recorded sandwich was made by the famous Rabbi, Hillel the Elder, who lived during the 1st century B.C. A poor man, but a great scholar, he began the Passover custom of sandwiching a mixture of chopped nuts, apples, spices, and wine between two matzohs. This sandwich is the foundation of the Seder and is named after him. But matzoh, being a cracker-like hard unleavened bread, is not absorptive of sauces and juices as the bread used in today's sandwiches
Before the Renaissance and the invention of the fork, thick slices of bread, called trenchers, were used to soak up the sauces accompanying pieces of meat. The word comes from the French verb trenchier or trancher, which means ‘to cut’. Each trencher was eaten at each meal, and a new one made for the subsequent meal by simply cutting off new a slice from the loaf. If the meal was formal and elaborate, trenchers might be changed more than once during the meal. The advent of the fork, however, dictated that using fingers to lift food recipes was bad manners. The trencher became passé.
Legend has it that he word sandwich that we use today was born in London during the very late hours one night in 1762 when an English nobleman, John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), was too busy gambling to stop for a meal even though he was hungry. The story goes that he ordered a waiter to bring him roast-beef between two slices of bread. From that incident, we have inherited that quick-food product that we now know as the sandwich. He apparently had the meat between the slices of bread so he wouldn’t get his fingers greasy while he was playing cards.
The original “sandwich” was thus probably no more than salt-beef held between two toasted slices of bread. But it caught on like wildfire. So much so, that while the Italians and the French remained true to the freeform bread, the English took to baking theirs in tins simply because such a preparation was better suited for sandwiches – the bread was less crusty and offered more dough to absorb the juices. Whatever be the case, the English loved their sarnies: the nickname for sandwiches.
By the present day and age, the sandwich has been reinvented over and over again, perhaps more times than the proverbial wheel itself. There’s no rigid recipe, just a sweepingly general directive that you need something (edible, of course!) to put between two slices of bread and you’re good to go. The filling can have exotic ingredients, or maybe you can just use everyday food items in different permutations and combinations to come up with something unique every single time! Just talking of bread, the variety you can get for that alone is mind-boggling. So technically, one can write a whole book on sandwiches and yet not exhaust all the possible [url=http://www.ijustlovefood.com]food recipes[/url]. And that’s the beauty of this simple concept that they call the sandwich: your sandwich can be what you want it to be. |
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