A chicken salad sandwich. Chopped chicken breast tossed with almonds, celery, and tarragon, topped with romaine, and served between two slices of brown bread on a white plate.
5 October 2022
Sandwich is the word that introduced me to etymology. I read an account of the oft-repeated story of the word’s origin while in elementary school. There is reason, though, to question that story’s veracity—it may or may not be true. First what we know for a fact.
The earliest known use of the word sandwich to describe a dish consisting of slices of meat served between two slices of bread is in the journal of historian Edward Gibbon for 27 July 1762. On that day, Gibbon writes of a late-night meal at the Cocoa Tree coffeehouse:
We went thence to the play (the Spanish Friar); and when it was over, returned to the Cocoa Tree. That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch.
It's clear from this passage that the word was already established by 1762, at least among the fashionable London set that Gibbon was a part of. With that factual basis established, let’s look at the popular story.
Allegedly, the sandwich is named for John Montagu (1718–92), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, as the story goes, was an inveterate gambler who could not be bothered to leave the gaming table to eat, so he would have the dish served to him, hence the name. It’s very likely that the sandwich is indeed named for Montagu—there is no other plausible explanation for how the dish got its name. The bit about gambling and not leaving the gaming table, however, is questionable, but it may indeed turn out to be true. We just don’t know.
1783 Gainsborough portrait of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. A man in eighteenth-century dress, a blue suit with gold trim and a powdered wig, standing and holding a roll of paper with the title “Infirmary.”
That gambling story is based on a single account by the French travel writer Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765, while Montagu was serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty. Grosley writes in his 1779 Londres:
Les Anglois profonds, violens, outrés dans toutes leurs passions, portent celle du jeu á l’extrême: on nomme plusieurs lords trés-riches qui s’y sont absolument ruinés: d’autres prennent sur les affaires, sur le repos, sur leur santé le temps qu’ils lui donnent. Un minister d’Etat passa 24 heures dans un jeu public, toujours occupé au pointe que, pendant ces 24 heures, il ne vécut que de quelques tranches de bœuf grillé, qu’il se faisoit servir entre deux rôties de pain & qu’il mangeoit sans quitter le jeu. Ce nouveau mets prit faveur pendant mon séjour à Londres: on le baptisa du nom du minister qui l’avoit imaginé, pour économiser le temps.
(The English, deep, violent, excessive in all their passions, carry that for gaming to the extreme; several wealthy lords are named whom it brought to absolute ruin; others take from the business, from the rest, from their health the time they give to it. A Minister of State spent 24 hours in a gaming house, always busy to the point that, during these 24 hours, he subsisted only on a few slices of grilled beef, that he had served to him between two toasted pieces of bread & that he ate without leaving the game. This new dish took favor during my stay in London: it was baptized with the name of the minister who had imagined it, to save time.)
Grosley doesn’t specifically name Montagu, but given that the dish was called a sandwich, it’s pretty obvious who he is referring to. But this is a rather sensational story, which, given that Gibbon had casually used the word two years earlier, was written several years after the term’s coinage. It is more likely that Grosley is repeating old gossip. Given Gibbon’s earlier use of the word, Grosley is mistaken when he says the word had been newly coined upon his arrival in London.
Furthermore, Montagu’s biographer, N.A.M. Rodger, points out that while the earl, like most of contemporaries of his class and station, did gamble, he was far from an inveterate gambler. What other accounts we have of his activities at the gaming tables describe a man who whose betting was rather restrained and who did so primarily for the social and professional connections, much like a present-day businessman might take up golf.
Instead, Rodger postulates that Montagu’s connection to the invention of the sandwich instead comes from his habit of eating meals at his desk while working. This explanation, however, runs into a problem of dates. Rodger points out that Grosley’s 1765 visit to London coincides with one of Montagu’s stints as a cabinet minister. A busy government official might indeed have a habit of eating at his desk. But evidently Rodger was unaware of Gibbon’s 1762 use of sandwich and the fact that Grosley was relaying an old bit of gossip. Montagu was not in government in 1762, and one has to go back to 1751 to find a time when he was. And indeed, Rodger writes:
In 1751, however, Sandwich had no work to do. The collapse of his career and his marriage more or less simultaneously seems to have robbed him of personal as well as financial stability. Up to 1751 he was often cited as a model of respectability, and throughout his life he lived frugally, but once out of office he began to acquire the reputation of a libertine which never left him. It is clear that it was not altogether unjustified.
It appears, however, that Montagu’s indiscretions were more often of an amorous rather than a wagering variety. But by 1765, Montagu’s recent re-entry into government may have provided the reason for the old gossip being newly re-circulating during Grosley’s visit. So, the story of the gambling earl cannot be easily dismissed. While there is some reason to question it, there really isn’t a good alternative for how the sandwich came to be named for the earl.
The verb to sandwich, meaning to place something between two other things, like meat between slices of bread, is in place by the early-to-mid nineteenth century. From a letter published in the New York Daily Express on 9 August 1837 that rhapsodizes about the beauty of the Susquehanna River valley:
Cooper lives above me at the head waters of the river, and mayhap will send me a flower of fancy by a Hindoo post, and below me eighty miles, is poetic Wyoming—what I call a pretty parenthesis. I would willingly take chance for immortality sandwiched between Cooper and Campbell.
Sources:
Gibbon Edward. Journal, 27 July 1762. Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, vol. 1 of 2. London: A. Strahan, et al., 1796, 110. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Grosley, Pierre-Jean. Londres, vol. 1. Lausanne: 1770, 262. Google Books.
Letter. New York Daily Express, 9 August 1837, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sandwich, n.2.
Rodger, N.A.M. The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1718–1792. London: HarperCollins, 1993, 76–81.
Tréguer, Pascal. “History of the Word ‘Sandwich.’” Wordhistories.net. 23 March 2017.
Image credits: Chicken salad sandwich: Lara604, 2012, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Earl of Sandwich: Thomas Gainsborough, 1783. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.