Wait…what actually is a sandwich? — Sandwich (2024)

A sandwich is a sandwich, is a sandwich, is a sandwich. We all know how this goes…you think I’m going to wax lyrical about an aristocrat with a gambling problem who didn’t want to get his cards dirty. Little do you know that I’m going to traverse the expected and sidestep your preconceptions – or do you? Or am I? Have you known all along? Let’s look beneath the bread, pick apart the filling and answer one of the great questions of our time. What actually is a sandwich?

If you want to tell me that humans have had bread to hand for over six thousand years and it took until the 18th century before someone had the novel idea of encasing some delicious tidbits betwixt two slices, I’m not buying it. I don’t deny that one of the most successful rebranding exercises of all time occurred when an earl named John from a town called Sandwich got a reputation for eating a truck load of sangers. That’s just what it is though, a fantastic renaming on a par with Blue Ribbon Sports deciding to name themselves after the Greek goddess of victory and use a big ol’ swoosh as their logo. By the 1700s Britain was at the peak of its “let’s give everything a new name” phase, whether that was places, peoples or portable edibles. John Montagu was a man of the world, having been on a ‘Grand Tour’ of continental Europe before tagging on the nations of Greece, Turkey and the land of the original bread munchers – Egypt. He had likely discovered his love of handheld lunches in the rich culinary landscape of the Mediterranean. If someone tried to pass off the stuffed pitta as their own invention today, they’d be dragged through the dirt and labelled as a cultural appropriator of the highest order. All this distracts from the heart of the question, when all is said and done, what constitutes a sandwich? What’s in a name? That which we call a marie-rose by any other name would taste just as sweet. How does your bread need to be dressed to get in the club?

On the walk to school this morning, I discussed the problem with my eight-year-old daughter, her sandwich boundaries were clear-cut. Toast is not a sandwich, but if it has a filling, and is folded in half, it becomes one. Beans on toast is not a sandwich, but a tortilla wrap gets the nod. The key, she says, is that you have to be able to hold it – and walk around. The bread, or bread-like vehicle, has to have freed itself from the burden of requiring a plate. This kind of freewheeling liberalism opens the floodgates for a cascade of foodstuffs to enter the sandwiches-only office Christmas party. Bao, spring rolls, samosas, kebabs, hot dogs, tacos, burritos and crispy duck pancakes all make the grade if you listen to my kid. I fear that taking such a technical approach may lead us to arguments claiming that, for instance, an apple is a sandwich. It’s definitely not, but it could be claimed that the sweet flesh is held in place with a wrap of skin, requires no plate and can be eaten on the move. If we are going to get to the bottom of this, then a fleeting chat with a primary school child isn’t going to be enough.

In the introduction to Max’s Sandwich Book by Max Halley and Ben Benton, food critic Amol Rajan states that “in the past few years the sandwich has undergone a kind of identity crisis. Brilliant essays and books have been written about how the sandwich both reflects and shapes our culture. Apparently, by emancipating us from the tyranny of the dining table and cutlery, and by allowing us to eat on the go, the sandwich speaks for a time-poor, cash-rich society.” There is no doubt that we are living in the sandwich epoch, since the 1980s the rise of the mobilised munchables has shot off the charts. There was a time (not so long ago) when to see someone walking and eating simultaneously would have been wildly eccentric. The liberation from cutlery is a curious one, insofar as almost all of human ‘progression’ has been aimed at distancing ourselves from the animal kingdom. Sandwiches thrust us straight back to the prehistoric grab-and-go days, with no spoons, knives or fancy Italian forks to keep us from bestial comparison. Even removing the crusts for an English ‘afternoon tea’ doesn’t mask the reality that we are naughty little apes shovelling soft cucumber-filled fingers of bread into our chompers.

Most would say that it must, but what is bread? The faithful Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it is “a staple food made by mixing flour and water or other liquid (often yeast or other leavening agent) to form a dough which is then cooked, usually by baking.” While most of us may conjure up a sliced white, wrapped and tagged, our sphere of influence must be expanded. By the OED’s exacting standards, I would argue that corn tortillas are bread, a flour is made by grinding maize and when water is added a masa (dough) forms which is then baked. Before any of you come for me regarding the definition of ‘baked’ I revert again to my old lexicographical pal who reminds me it means “to cook (food) by dry heat, without direct exposure to flame, typically in an oven, or sometimes on a heated surface such as a griddle, baking stone etc.” This does start to exclude some of the aforementioned examples, bao as a case in point are definitely made in the same way as bread but steamed instead of baked – does this eliminate them? Steam is injected into bread ovens at the start of baking to assist oven spring (when the dough expands dramatically at the start and develops the flavours of the crust), and develop the flavours of the crust so if we are going to outlaw steam then our sandwiches must become breadless. Which would be a sad day indeed. Bagels are boiled and baked, but it’d be unthinkable to stop calling a lox-stuffed ring of deliciousness a sandwich. Going down this road it’s all semantwich.

Most would say that it must, but what is bread? The faithful Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it is “a staple food made by mixing flour and water or other liquid (often yeast or other leavening agent) to form a dough which is then cooked, usually by baking.” While most of us may conjure up a sliced white, wrapped and tagged, our sphere of influence must be expanded. By the OED’s exacting standards, I would argue that corn tortillas are bread, a flour is made by grinding maize and when water is added a masa (dough) forms which is then baked. Before any of you come for me regarding the definition of ‘baked’ I revert again to my old lexicographical pal who reminds me it means “to cook (food) by dry heat, without direct exposure to flame, typically in an oven, or sometimes on a heated surface such as a griddle, baking stone etc.” This does start to exclude some of the aforementioned examples, bao as a case in point are definitely made in the same way as bread but steamed instead of baked – does this eliminate them? Steam is injected into bread ovens at the start of baking to assist oven spring (when the dough expands dramatically at the start and develops the flavours of the crust), and develop the flavours of the crust so if we are going to outlaw steam then our sandwiches must become breadless. Which would be a sad day indeed. Bagels are boiled and baked, but it’d be unthinkable to stop calling a lox-stuffed ring of deliciousness a sandwich. Going down this road it’s all semantwich. The meat of a sarnie can’t be discovered in the stale pages of a dictionary, we must look deeper, beyond words. Someone call Doc Brown and tell him to get the DeLorean out of the garage, we’re going back in time.

Around the age that Jesus was strutting his stuff, another Jewish religious leader was making some pretty important discoveries. Aside from a wealth of teachings, Hillel the Elder put together a sandwich. He probably called it a Hillel though. The filling? Paschal lamb and bitter herbs between two soft matzahs, which is pretty similar to a shawarma and something I’d certainly have a go on. It’s a meal of remembrance, a cultural checkpoint that uses the senses to reaffirm a spiritual ideology. Food that lasts the ages is so often wrapped in its own ‘bread’ of symbolism, a sandwich within a sandwich. A meta-sandwich. A hall of mirrors, but instead of mirrors there are just rows and rows of service-station fridges. As we stroll down searching for the one that best represents our own beliefs, views and desires. Too much? Too little? You tell me. The key takeaway here is that passover provided the perfect conditions for inventing food on-the-go. Not only that, but the composition of soft, crunchy, hot, cold, bitter and sweet is an equation for success for any bite to eat. Well before sandos were being guzzled down in 18th century England, another colonial superpower – the Dutch – were tucking into ‘belegde broodje’ in the preceding century. Naturalist John Ray observed cured beef hanging from the ceiling which was sliced thinly and eaten on buttered bread. This sounds suspiciously like an open sandwich to me, and although it’s an important stage in the evolution of the form, I don’t think we can allow qualified sandwiches to muddy the water. That’s right, I’m not okay with lidless wonders. I’ve never seen a tarted-up city slicker marching down Wall St with a slice of rye topped with smoked salmon and horseradish cream (maybe a wisp of finely chopped dill and cornichon garnish to counterbalance the fatty fish). My decision here is final, the hand must not come into contact with the filling when grasped. If there was a bible of sandwiches it would say “and lo, may the filling be kept safe from desirous eyes of thy neighbour and the finger clean from the entrails within. A blanket of carbs shall be thy keeper.”

One of the great culinary schisms is between two formats of bread, the loaf and the flatbread. One that would seek to envelope, and the other to clamp. Most purists would argue that we must adhere to the Montaguian layering – bread-filling-bread. On top of this, the tranches must be separate when viewed from the side aspect. While the more format-fluid among us would allow a bun (not entirely cut through) or even a wrap to provide the structure for what lies inside. Why did this come about? Moroccan khobz, English cobs, Arab khubz all signify a round shape of bread – cob is Old English for ‘head’ after all. But some of these are loaf-like and others flat, the type of ovens used have a big part to play in this. The Egyptians seem to have been pioneers in the bread-oven world, creating chambers with chimneys not unlike your fancy uncle Brian’s pizza oven he had built last summer (but has never used). The Romans aped their erstwhile empirical superiors and set about planting wheat and building ovens like nobody’s business. Archaeologists found some 2,000-year-old ‘panis quadratus’ in an oven in Pompeii. This bread was scored into wedges and it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to assume the Romans stuffed these with all sorts of delicious deli-fayre. The Anglo-Saxons had ‘trenchers’ of bread which roughly translates as ‘plates’, the hard-baked bottom would suffice as tableware soaking up the juices from the main meal and eaten at the end - sometimes left for the lower social classes. All this round bread and yet our own modern idea of sandwiches is all squares and triangles. The collective noun for sandwiches is even a ‘round’. In France, a boulanger was a maker of boules, or balls of bread. Hold the phone! I think we’ve been doing it all wrong. The milling of antiquity didn’t allow for the pillowy, gaseous crumb that we find in modern bread. Stone-grinding emulsifies the constituent parts of the grain and dilutes the gluten-forming proteins in a nutritious pick’n’ mix of amino acids, vitamins, fibre and non-gluten-forming proteins. The result is a much flatter loaf, but one that is supremely beneficial to our health. Modern milling allowed for the fracturing of the three main parts of the grain; the gluten-rich endosperm could be milled on its own resulting in a shelf-stable super-white flour. This became the base for the bread that has seen a huge rise in gluten intolerance and much negative press for our long-time culinary companion. It also provided the perfect attributes for making strong spongey loaves that could tolerate the torture chamber of an industrial food operation.

Square bread really came into its own with the advent of slicing, and we have the USA to thank for that. I’m not going to make a reference to it being the best thing since…but if you need to scratch that itch then please do so quietly at the back of the class. In the perineum between the two World Wars (1929 to be exact), Otto Rohwedder gave us the slicing machine – six years after the wrapping machine had taken the baking world by storm. By 1933, 80% of America’s bread was sliced and wrapped. The market was drowning in sliced-up cubes, balls were out and the big question was what was going to go between all these bready geometric sheets?

So far, all the chat has been centred on the consumable packaging and nothing on the filling. We must now right that wrong. Early sandwiches were limited by the lack of temperature-controlled storage, and you were really looking at two options: cured meat or cured milk (cheese). There would be some local variations and exceptions but lunchtime didn’t provoke the kind of existential headache that you see at the coal-face of many a sandwich fridge in today’s metropolitan stores. When thinking back to the packed lunches of my own childhood the fillings were microbially reliable, the addition of potato chips would indicate a pioneering spirit, but there’s only so much you can do with ham or cheese. In America, the PB&J is a staple citizen of the lunchbag, but surely this is a dessert? In the UK, children would be fed jam sandwiches or even sugar sandwiches (poor little bastards). With the constitution of the mass-produced bread that lines contemporary supermarket aisles these options are closer to cake than anything else, why not just cash in all your chips and eat a Victoria sandwich of jam-stuffed vanilla sponge?

In his brilliant book, Ultra-Processed People, Chris van Tulleken views most of our options as examples of ‘UPFs’ (ultra-processed foods). “It’s not food,” he states, “it’s an industrially produced edible substance.” The desire for increased options at the chiller has necessitated a tidal surge of emulsifiers, stabilisers and preserving agents that have turned our midday meal into an experiment in alchemy, without a permission slip in sight. One UK-based chain offers over 80 options for your pythagorean pick-up, most smothered in mayonnaise for damp-proofing the carefully formulated bread that will stay conceivably fresh for days. These sandwiches are a symptom of that “cash-rich, time-poor” situation that Amol Rajan mentions. Copy-and-paste lunches for copy-and-paste people, the swarms of urban worker bees who have minutes to refuel in preparation for an afternoon at the desk. But not all sandwiches are like this: if you are prepared to pay triple the price you can have a freshly made sandwich that will knock your socks off. The kind of thing we see being made in season one of The Bear, fresh bread from a real baker with real bags under their eyes, hot juicy fillings that will only be good for thirty minutes, and will be in your belly within five. I would argue that no place on earth takes the hot sandwich more seriously than the USA, with po’boys, subs, cheesesteaks, reubens and grilled cheese just some of their heavyweight contenders. Perhaps the transitory beginnings of the nation have hardwired a passion for movable feasts similar to that of our old pal Hillel.

In Philadelphia, for example, woe betide the fool who tries to mess with the cheesesteak. It isn’t just a sandwich, it’s part of the city’s identity. You would be better off ripping down the Eiffel Tower before trying to add sauerkraut to the sacred philly. Likewise in Paris they have their faithful ‘jambon-beurre’, a simple composition of butter and ham in a traditional baguette. In New York the parameters are some of the most relaxed I’ve found, basically if a filling is served in anything at all bread-like it can be called a sandwich. The Big Apple has reaped the rewards for this laissez-faire attitude with some of the finest stateside sammy spots. In California (for tax purposes) a hot dog and a burger are sandwiches and the USDA defines it as “meat between two slices of bread, a bun or biscuit”. Not sure what the vegetarian and vegan community would have to say about that after inhaling a falafel and hummus on rye.

The global expression of identity through sandwich artistry is a true marvel, at bodegas worldwide we can unpack the stories that explain national histories. Whether it’s a ‘Banh-Mi’ in Ho Chi Minh City, a Vietnamese filling surrounded by a colonial baguette or a Japanese ‘Sando’ which dates back to the first European influence provided by Portuguese and Dutch traders with later influence from the British and United States. On a more individual level, each sandwich we make is a statement of self, when we peel back our starch-laden cloak we are laid bare to be truly known. If you were a sandwich, what would you be? That is probably a question in the interview process for Google, and if it isn’t, it should be. All the various incarnations of the medium have a claim to be heard – from bocadillos, panini, muffins, baps and huffers to ciabattas, subs, softies, toasties and focaccia. Where you stick it is your own business.

I would say this, however, I believe a sandwich to be a hand-held, portable snack that says something about who you are. It said something about Hillel the Elder, John Montagu and various other humans before, during and since. Now, go and make a bite to eat, open the cupboard of possibilities and when you are ready to take the first bite, pause…for a moment…and bask in the light it shines upon your character. Then stuff your greedy chops like the animal that you are.

This story first appeared in Sandwich 08 - the Chef’s Special issue. You can buy your copy here.

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