Sandwiches

Again

A note: I wrote this letter last week, before the Canadian wildfires brought the climate crisis to my air in the Northeast. Before the Russian assault on Ukraine took another dreadful turn. Our lives are sandwiches of the everyday, the wretched, and the curious. I’m dropping some suggested places to donate at the bottom of this post.

Dear Bread Fans,

I can’t stop reading about sandwiches. When I told this to my son Felix he enthused that they’re the ideal food: portable, affordable, and easy to make. His favorite is just cheddar cheese on bread, which he often dresses up with mustard and pickles.

If you are intrigued with the history of the sandwich or any other food, I suggest you follow me to the Food Timeline, an incredible resource. In the extensive entry on sandwiches, there’s lots of information, including festivals and the origin stories of several iconic types of sandwiches.

What caught my attention most was a quote from a 1924 NY Times article titled Sandwiches Flourishing:

“The day of the sandwiches has arrived. It is so proclaimed by placards and posters plastered over the business districts. A new type of lunchroom substantiates the announcement--the 'sandwich house.' It may offer side lines of hot dishes and pastries, but to sandwiches it owes its existence. For them it is known and patronized. In its turn it has served to change the status of the commodity. 'A sandwich used to represent a picnic or a pink tea,' commented one business man addicted to the habit. 'At best it was just a mouthful of something to eat to tide you over until mealtime. Now it is lunch. You may order something to keep it company, but the sandwich is the main thing. It is the corn beef and cabbage, the steak and onions, the liver and bacon of other years.'" — "Sandwiches Flourishing” New York Times, November 2, 1924 (p. XX2)

Further on, the story mentioned machines to slice bread and meat. Since this was four years before the 1928 patent of the bread slicer that made sliced bread the best thing since bagged bread, I started rooting around for earlier reference to bread slicers. When did automated slicing really begin?

I found a few American patents. John Oxley of Sheffield, England filed a US patent in 1864, for an improved bread cutter, which “consists, essentially, in the employment of a knife which is connected at one end with a vibrating lever-handle working on a center fixed to the table or base of the apparatus.” In 1882, Abel Moore of Lawrence, Massachusetts filed a patent for a device that held bread, cake and other such foods in place for even slicing—no vibrating lever-handles in sight. W.C. Knapp of Rochester, New York filed for his Liberty Bread Slicing Machine, which used “a revolving cutter or knife.” This 1920 patent improved upon a similar 1918 invention by having a part to catch crumbs.

These patents resemble the bread slicers I have:

one looks like a guillotine, and is used for sturdy Northern European breads, and the other has a circular blade that revolves. I don’t use either of these anymore because I had one of my accidents of enthusiasm while using the latter. I did not need stitches but it was a lousy moment. (I hid the slicers from myself and really had to hunt through the house to find them for this picture.)

The more remarkable thing about that NY Times article was the migration of the sandwich from the sidelines of working class lunches and tea rooms to white collar meal.

“'Before the war you could not get away with the idea that a sandwich was enough lunch for a business man. But somehow they have come to the conviction that a light lunch is the best thing if they expect to go back to the office and do their best during the afternoon.’” — quote from an anonymous restaurant keeper in "Sandwiches Flourishing” New York Times, November 2, 1924 (p. XX2)

These men may have sanctioned the sandwich, but credit for this kind of eats generally falls to another man, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. John Montagu lent his title to this food when he asked his chef for something easy to eat at the card table so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his game. The idea didn’t fall from heaven into his head. Every country has a staple that is bread or acts like bread, a batter or dough-based food to grip other foods—pitas, tortillas, injera, and chapatis to name a few—and the Earl had traveled to Turkey and Greece, where he would have seen and eaten pita breads. Funny how names and credit flow.

Before sandwich became generic for easy lunch, Sandwich was a place in England, named as England became England more than 1000 years ago. To me, a sandwich is a trip down memory lane, but the word for the thing that initiated my journey means “market town on sandy soil.” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, Eilert Ekwall, Clarendon Press, 1951.)

The bread that established my connections to this food is factory bread, which is the American contribution to the form. We mechanized bread baking and invented the factory loaf. Such upsizing was not unique to bread, of course; the scales of farming and food production grew as our country did.

While agricultural sins of the 20th century are blamed for the current state of our food and farming systems, the American goal was always one of expansion. Nineteenth century advances in farming and food processing set the stage for the arrival of chemical agriculture and the end of diversified farming following WWII. By the time USDA Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz commanded farmers to “get big or get out” of agriculture in 1971, we had more than 100 years of getting big under our belts. Butz simply spoke a clear truth about agricultural policies that had emerged along with agribusiness.

Mechanization hit baking in the late 1800s, and Ward’s Bakery in 1910 claimed the first full automation, creating bread that was never touched by human hands until the consumer opened the wrapper. Jeweler Otto Rohwedder closed his shops in 1912 to begin designing a bread slicer. Execution took him 16 years, because a 1917 fire interrupted his progress. He had to regroup, and only when he got very ill and was facing death did he reorganize, and get the project going again. The first slicer was used in a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri in 1928, and the habit really took off.

Why this man had such passion for the project I do not know, but he read the breadcrumbs and saw that evenly slicing and bagging bread were the next key steps in our bread continuum. I’ve listed some nice stories about him and his invention below.

We were already well on our way to becoming a sandwich eating land, but pre-sliced bread formally nudged us into adoring sandwiches. I’m digging around trade journals, looking for promotions of sandwich-making and eating — I’ll include them in my next sandwich post, because sandwich season is eternal.

Yours, Amy

Resources:

Listen to this story about Chillicothe, Missouri and the inventor of the automated bread slicer, Otto Rohwedder.

The Complete History of Sliced Bread from Tasting Table has lots of information, and more links to follow.

Here’s a link for the Food Timeline again, and I highly encourage you to read Dayna Evans’ great story about this incredible compendium and the librarian who started it, Lynn Olver.

If you have financial resources to share, please help Razom Ukraine or the Legacy of War Foundation.