SO THE sandwich is dying. Having survived Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution and two world wars, another great British institution of which no other nation has seen the merit bites the sawdust. Tesco announces this week that the egg and cress sandwich (for decades its most popular lunchtime snack) has been knocked off the top spot by a foreign interloper. Shome mishtake here, shurely, PH. Are we sure about these statistics? I should have thought that cheese and pickle and ham and mustard were superior and more popular sandwiches than egg and cress, forsooth, fortuna, forploughman’s.
Beef that as it may, the statisticians for Britain’s biggest seller of sandwiches aver that last month the most popular snack was American-style chicken Caesar salad wrap. A wrap is a Mexican tortilla, made of flour and water: a kind of cactus pancake.
The sandwich is interesting linguistically. It is as peculiarly English as a chip butty is gastronomically. Sandwich is the most prolific eponym in the lexicon. As Fred, a Benedict, emerged from behind the Arras to enter his Brougham waiting on the Macadam, he was wearing Jodhpurs, a Cardigan and Wellies. No Beau Brummell, his Burnsides were untouched by Occam’s razor. Wearing a Panama instead of his usual Balmoral, he was munching a Bologna Sandwich, drinking his Java from fine China.
He was smoking a Havana while holding a half-eaten Napoleon, and drinking Hock mixed with Cognac. Some of those are a subset of eponyms, called toponyms. They are place names rather than proper person names that have become common nouns. The notorious 4th Earl of Sandwich has been responsible for more eponyms even than the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon.
It was 5am on August 6, 1762. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, looked up from the gaming table and decided that he was hungry. The earl was an inveterate punter in the middle of one of his notorious round-the-clock gambling sessions, in which we are all about to be able to indulge at Las Vegas in Blackpool or Highgate, thanks to the sporting passions of Tessa Jowell. He did not dare leave his cards for a meal, in case his luck changed. So he ordered his man to bring him some cold, thick-sliced roast beef between two slices of toasted bread. So the first sandwich, a toasty, was born.
This story is told in Grosley’s Londres (1770). Grosley was living in London in 1765. He speaks of the Sandwich as having just come into the language. The first recorded instance of the word in English is from Edward Gibbon’s journal for November 24, 1762. He refers to dining at the Cocoa-Tree and seeing: “Twenty or thirty of the first men in the kingdom supping at little tables upon a bit of cold meat or a sandwich.”
The Romans had something similar, called an offula, a scrap of meat. It was an insult to call someone offula crucis: sandwich for the cross, ie, gallow’s meat. And Hillel Hababli (the Babylonian), the Jewish teacher, invented something like the sandwich when, around 100BC, he ate bitter herb and unleavened bread as part of the Jewish Passover meal. His proto-sandwich symbolised man’s triumph over the ills of life.
Sandwich, the eponym or nomenclator, not his stale invention inextricably wrapped in polythene, was an early victim of the British love of sleaze, scandal and slicing the heads off the tallest poppy politicians. He was a member of the Hellfire Club, the Monks of Medmenham, whose motto was: Fay ce que voudras. He betrayed his fellow-member, John Wilkes, by reading his filthy verses, beginning, “Awake my Sandwich”, to the House of Lords. At a contemporary performance of The Beggar’s Opera the house rose to the words of Macheath in the last scene: “That Jemmy Twitcher should peach me, I own surprised me.” From that day Sandwich was known as Jemmy Twitcher.
Wilkes’s more faithful ally, Charles Churchill, described Sandwich as: “Too infamous to have a friend,/ Too bad for bad men to commend.” Sandwich was an ungainly man. Seeing him, somebody said: “I am sure it is Lord Sandwich; for, if you observe, he is walking down both sides of the street at once.” And Sandwich himself used to tell how, on taking leave of his dancing master in Paris, and offering him any service in London, the man answered: “I should take it as a particular favour if your Lordship would never tell anyone of whom you learned to dance.” As First Lord of the Admiralty he was blamed for the corruption and inefficiency that were rampant in the Navy.
No public man of the 18th century was the target of such bitter, such violent partisan invective. And yet he was admired and loved by his subordinates at the Admiralty. Captain James Cook named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) after him, because he was First Lord during the American Revolution and outfitted Cook’s ship.
But that is only one of Sandwich’s many eponyms. Most of them are derived from the notion of sandwiching something between two layers. Hence we have the sandwich man who still patrols Oxford Street announcing that “The End of the World is Nigh”, even in our age of unintelligible commercials. Hence sandwich course, sandwich training, a sandwich board, and the sandwich boat (the boat which rows in two divisions of the bumping races at Oxford and Cambridge). There are dozens of other sandwich namesakes.
Wordsmiths describe synonyms joined by “and” as sandwiches. English is peculiarly rich in this form of tautology or diplophrasis: aches and pains; alas and alack; bits and pieces; fun and games; huff and puff; kith and kin; etc and etc. There are even trinomials, the equivalent of a triple-decker Dagwood sandwich: Hook, line and sinker. The Dagwood is a thick sandwich with a variety of fillings, named (in the Seventies) after Dagwood Bumstead, a comic-strip character, suitor and later husband of Blondie. He makes and eats this type of doorstop sandwich.
I do not believe the dreary and puffing statisticians that tacos, croque m’sieu, roasted mealies or any other alien snack is going to replace the linguistic and gastronomic peculiarity of the traditional English sandwich. We are too set in our ways and our language. The sandwich is too convenient for eating as we sit pounding the keyboard of our computers, though it does make the keys sticky. Not as sticky as tacos. Pass the mustard please, My Nomenclator Lord.
