What are you having for lunch?
There’s a pretty good chance that it will be some sort of sandwich, and even if you aren’t having one today, the chances of you not having one all week are very small indeed.
Us Brits love a sarnie.
In fact, the average UK resident will smash 18,304 sandwiches in their lifetime, spending almost £50k on the carb filled beauties, with 56% of us eating one every single day.
But this is a website about online betting, so why are we banging on about our packed lunch?
Because without gambling, the sandwich may never have been ‘invented’ in the first place.
That’s right, it was during a gambling session that the first sandwich is said to have been consumed, or at least the first recorded instance of a sandwich being consumed.
There is some argument about the finer details to this story since it happened so long ago, but here is the story of how betting gave birth to the idea of the humble sandwich.
John Montagu: The 4th Earl of Sandwich
Yes he was a real person and no we haven’t just made him up. He also had a mistress called Fanny Murray for a time, but other than sounding funny that has nothing to do with the story.
The Earl of Sandwich is a noble title in the Peerage of Great Britain that was created in 1660 for Admiral Sir Edward Montagu. It survives to this day, the 11th Earl of Sandwich also named John Montagu, who is a member of the House of Lords.
It is the 4th Earl of Sandwich that we are interested in though.
If you look at his list of titles, the 4th Earl sounds like a fairly impressive fellow; Post Master General, Secretary of State for the Northern Department (now the Foreign Office), and First Lord of the Admiralty on three occasions.
However, the quote “Seldom has any man held so many offices and achieved so little” is about him, and he was well known for his corruption and incompetence, so perhaps it’s just a case of being given positions by birth rather than by merit.
Among all these other things that he was or wasn’t good at, there is one thing Montagu definitely was; an avid gambler.
He started betting on the horses, quite cautiously if the rumours are to be believed, but he then moved on to cards, with Euchre being a favourite game, and the stakes got much higher too.
He would often spend long periods at the gaming table with fortunes being played for – on one occasion he reportedly played for over 24 hours.
He did not like to break to eat during these long sessions, however he obviously still needed food so would have it brought to the table. He enjoyed foods like salt beef which, when eaten with bare hands, would cause his fingers to become greasy, and that would in turn make the cards greasy and difficult to handle.
Montague had spent time abroad and seen other cultures stuff pittas and naans with all sorts of ingredients, so he took inspiration and instructed his serving staff to bring him some roast beef between two slices of bread so that he could eat it at the table without dirtying the cards, and thus the sandwich was born.
This unique little trick – and that is how it was seen back in 1762 – became a regular occurrence, and in the end the other people around the card table would ask for the same thing.
It is said that men would order “the same as Sandwich”, which over time simply became ‘the Sandwich’ or ‘a Sandwich’ – a bit like young football fans used to ask for ‘a Beckham’ when they wanted the same haircut as Golden Balls.
Given that Montagu also worked in politics and was in the Navy, he got around a bit (just ask his mistress, Fanny), so it is likely that he would have repeated the stunt at his various places of work too, meaning it was observed by many more people than just his rich gambling buddies.
How did the Idea Catch on?
It’s a good question.
There were no video phones back then to record this crazy behaviour on, and even if there was some sort of recording device, there was no internet to share the video on.
No TikTok, no Twitter, no Youtube, no chance of going viral.
It’s more likely that people who played or worked with Montagu would witness this curious sandwich eating spectacle and then try it for themselves in front of their own friends.
It’s not exactly the macarena but it clearly caught on, probably because, actually, it’s a bloody good solution to what was a universal problem at the time.
The convenience of eating on the go hadn’t really been thought up at the time, so a sandwich was a brilliant work around for anyone wanting to eat messy foods without sitting down at the table with a knife and fork and all the extra gubbins people used to use.
The upper classes were the equivalent of celebrities back in the day, so once regular folk like you and me caught on that this new sandwich concept was a thing, they will have copied it.
It may have been an accidental invention, but it was a genuinely cracking idea and it revolutionised lunch time the world over.
People were packing sandwiches for lunch for centuries before the first pre-packed options became available though.
It was M&S who first put pre-packed sandwiches on the shelves back in 1980, and as we can see from some of the seasonal monstrosities that have been released since (lasagne sandwich anyone?), things have really got out of hand.
And all this because a guy who was enjoying himself at the card table didn’t want to break his stride.
Think about that next time you grab a £3.50 meal deal.
Captain Cook & the Sandwich Islands
Sandwich, Cook – what is it with posh people and their culinary sounding names?
As a little detour from the Sandwich’s origin story, you might also be interested to know that it was also gambling that was partly responsible for the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands in 1778.
The Earl of Sandwich part funded the voyage on which Captain Cook discovered modern day Hawaii, and so the famous explorer named the Islands after Sandwich; The Sandwich Islands.
Where did Montagu get the money to pay for the voyage?
It is said that he had a good run at the card table and won the money which he used to fund the trip.
They were renamed the Hawaiian Islands way back around 1840, since the biggest of them was Hawaii, so, if the above is true, gambling is indirectly responsible for the discovery of Hawaii.
Is that a more significant claim to fame than the invention of the sandwich?
Tough call.
Hawaii looks lovely and everything but sandwiches are pretty awesome.