Meat and nut sandwich

ELEANOR BARNETT leafs through a century-old cookbook to find a historical recipe for an unusual sandwich filling

- ELEANOR BARNETT

Today, the sandwich is arguably our favourite on-the-go lunch. It’s easy to understand why, with our busy modern lives, we often opt for this complete, filling, quickly made (and eaten) meal. In fact, in the UK, we each consume 200 sandwiches every year.

If we define the sandwich as filled bread, then it must be one of the oldest foods in history. In the first century BC, the rabbi Hillel the Elder established the custom of filling the matzah bread consumed at Passover with bitter herbs to make a Korech. In western Europe during the Middle Ages, labourers took bread and other ready-to-eat ingredients such as cheese to the fields where they worked, constructing something akin to sandwiches for their lunches.

There are no written references to the ‘sandwich’ until 1762, when Edward Gibbon wrote about his evening at the Cocoa Tree gentleman’s club in London where he'd enjoyed “supping in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch”.