1st Century B.C. – The first recorded sandwich was by the famous rabbi, Hillel the Elder, who lived during the 1st century B.C. He started the Passover custom of sandwiching a mixture of chopped nuts, apples, spices, and wine between two matzohs to eat with bitter herbs. The filling between the matzohs served as a reminder of the suffering of the Jews before their deliverance from Egypt and represented the mortar used by the Jews in their forced labor of constructing Egyptian buildings.
Because he was the first known person to do this, and because of his influence and stature in Palestinian Judaism, this practice was added to the Seder and the Hillel Sandwich was named after him.
6th to 16th Century – During the Middle Ages, thick blocks of coarse stale bread called trenchers were used in place of plates. Meats and other foods were piled on top of the bread to be eaten with their fingers and sometimes with the aid of knives. The trenchers, thick and stale, absorbed the juice, the grease, and the sauces. At the end of the meal, one either ate the trencher or, if hunger had been satisfied, tossed the gravy-soaked bread to their dogs or given as alms to less fortunate or poor human.
Alms were clothing, food, or money that is given to poor people. In the past, people thought it was their religious duty to give alms to the poor. Trenchers were clearly the forerunner of our open-face sandwiches.
16th and 17 Century – In Mark Morton’s well researched 2004 article Bread and Meat for God’s Sake, he wrote:
“What, then, were sandwiches called before they were sandwiches? After combing through hundreds of texts, mostly plays, that were written long before the Earl of Sandwich was even born, a possible (through somewhat prosaic) answer emerges. The sandwich appears to have been simply known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese.” These two phrases are found throughout English drama from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, in an anonymous late sixteenth-centry play called Love and Fortune, a young man pleads for “a peece of bread and meat for Gods sake. Around the same time, in The Old Wives Tale by George Peele, a character confesses, “I tooke a peece of bread and cheese, and came my way.” Shakespeare uses the phrase, too, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Nim announces, “I love not the humour of bread and cheese.” A slightly later anonymous play, known as The Knave in Grain, includes a pedlar called a “bread and meat man” in its dramatic personate, and Thomas Heywood’s seventeenth-century version of The Rape of Lucrece includes a song made up of the cries of street pedlars, including, “Bread and – meat – bread – and meat.” Dozens of other plays from the same era also make reference to “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese.”
1762 – The first written record of the word “sandwich” appeared in Edward Gibbons (1737-1794), English author, scholar, and historian, journal on November 24, 1762. Gibbon recorded his surprise at seeing a score or two of the noblest and wealthiest in the land, seated in a noisy coffee-room, at little tables covered by small napkins, supping off cold meat or sandwiches, and finishing with strong punch and confused politics.
“I dined at the Cocoa Tree….That respectable body affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty of the first men in the kingdom….supping at little tables….upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich.”
The Cocoa Tree, located at Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, was a fashionable gentlemen’s gaming club in London in the 18th century.Gaming houses in London were for the chosen few, where men of common tastes and of one class might meet together. In 1746 the Cocoa-tree Club became the haunt of politicians, particularly Tories, who met there under the guise of taking chocolate in order to hatch political plots. After 1750, only the more modest establishments survived, frequented by the public at large. The most select chocolate houses became private clubs, strictly limited to gentlemen from the ranks of high society.
1762 – It is also said that the cooks at London’s Beef Steak Club, a gentlemen’s gaming club held at the Shakespeare Tavern, invented the first sandwich.
The sublime society of Beef-steaks’ was very exclusive, limited to 24 members. The Prince of Wales became its 25th member. They dined off beef-steaks accompanied by generous amounts of port and arrack-punch. The members met at 5 o’clock on Saturday’s from November until the end of June. Each member could also invite a friend.
John Montague (1718-1792), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich:
He became First Lord of the Admiralty and was patron to Capt. James Cook (who explored New Zealand, Australia, Alaska, Hawaii, and Polynesia.). Capt. Cook named the Hawaiian Islands after him, calling them the Sandwich Island. Montague Island, a large island at the entrance to Prince William Sound on the Gulf of Alaska, was a