Why Did It Take So Long To Invent the Sandwich?

Assorted Musings About History and Our Places Within It

So one of my favorite books is this book entitled “How to Invent Everything”, authored by Ryan North, and I love it because the main conceit of the book is really interesting and fun. What if, the book asks, you were a time traveler that got stuck in the distant past, and you needed to reinvent civilization with the materials you have in, say, the paleo-lithic era. How quickly could you get back to modern day technology with electricity and computers? Turns out, pretty quickly if you put your mind to it. A lot of the stuff that was only the result of thousands of years of technology evolving would be pretty simple to put together if you know where you’re headed rather than fumbling in the dark. For example, if you know how to build a generator, you can skip right to electricity instead of waiting thousands of years for all the discoveries that enabled electricity to be made and spending hundreds of years thinking water wheels were the height of human achievement.

But even more interesting is the stuff we could have invented the whole time. We humans, it turns out, have wasted a lot of time and energy ignoring solutions to problems that were right in front of our noses. North brings a ton of examples of this; take for instance, the hot air balloon. Humanity has dreamed of taking to the skies for thousands of years, and it turns out all we needed was a fire, a large basket, and a large bag to act as a balloon. We could have been in hot air balloons in the Stone Age if anyone had bothered to try it!

An example that has long perplexed me is the invention of the sandwich. The story goes that an 18th century British guy, John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, while gambling with his friends, asked his servant or butler or slave or whatever to get him some meat placed between two slices of bread. Soon all his friends were asking for “the same as Sandwich” and thus the sandwich is born. Nice story, but…..it took until the 1700’s for someone to think of “hey, what if we put the meat between two slices of bread”?! We had the technology literally as long as we’ve had civilization! But there really is no mention of such a thing before the 1700’s. What took us so long?

Ah, but what about Korech and Hillel’s sandwich we eat at the seder? Well if you look at the text, Hillel’s invention was not for any culinary purpose, but to be able to fulfill the command to take matzah, marror, and the pesach in the most literal possible way by eating them all the same time. That’s right. I regret to inform you that Hillel was……a Brisker.

Even more interesting, to me at least, is the fact that, all the way across the world, in one of the most isolationist cultures in world history, there is a type of sushi roll with pretty much the same origin story, that of needing something quick and not messy to consume while playing cards that could be held in one hand while the cards were held in the other. Its name, Tekkamakki is actually derived from its origin; tekka means “gambler”, and its a tuna sushi roll with the nori on the outside so you don’t get rice all over your fingers.

Same phenomenon, manifesting differently in different cultures with regards to the specifics, but apparently gambling is a necessary component of the cultural context in which a specific kind of food comes to be, to the point that no one thought to put meat between two pieces of bread until someone needed a snack while gambling. Why? I have no idea.

What I’m saying is, in a roundabout way, is that history progresses as a result of innumerable complex interactions, one small thing affecting another thing which affects another thing which leads to another thing, and while sometimes we can detect small patterns, ultimately we do not know how or why all the pieces fit together, or where we fit in it. That the mere presence of raw materials does not unlock their potential without other historical processes evolving the means to do so or even the concepts that would allow people to see the potential in those raw materials. And while we can detect patterns sometimes, like gambling unlocking culinary creativity in disparate cultures, ultimately history is much much more complex than we can conceptualize. Judaism believes as a matter of faith that those complex processes are guided by an intelligence with an end goal in mind, and that we can catch glimpses of that intelligence when the world aligns with redemptive goals, but our place within it is beyond our comprehension.