Sandwich ─ A Global History

`The Edible Series contains some of the most delicious nuggets of food and drink history ever. Every volume is such a fascinating and succinct read that I had to devour each in just a single sitting ... food writing at its best!'--- Ken Hom, chef and author

`These are food memoirs, salacious and exotic, colorful, powdered, sweet, greasy and globe-trotting ... sharp and speedy little reads, spotted with off-kilter illustrations'--- Chicago Tribune

We may talk of grand feasts and fancy dinners, but most of the time, if we are honest, most of us are eating sandwiches. We snatch them at work and linger over them at picnics, buffets or tea parties. The sandwich is quick, simple and open to infinite variety and inventiveness.

Though sandwiches are a near-universal food, their origin can be traced to a precise historical figure: John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, one night before 1762, was too busy to stop for dinner and asked for some cold beef to be brought to him between two slices of bread. Sandwich unravels the mystery of how the Earl could have `invented' this most elementary and appealing way of eating. What were sandwiches like before the eighteenth-century `sandwich' came into being? Why did the name stick? And how did the Earl's invention take off so quickly around the globe?

This book brings together a wealth of material to trace how the sandwich has evolved throughout time and around the world. From the decadent meatball hoagie to the dainty cucumber sandwich, and from the Argentinian choripan to the Vietnamese Banh mi, the sandwich is loved the world over.

Bee Wilson is a historian and journalist. She writes a weekly food column for the Sunday Telegraph, `The Kitchen Thinker', for which she received the Guild of Food Writers' Food Journalist of the Year award in 2004, 2008 and 2009, and is the author of The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (2004) and Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee -- the Dark History of the Food Cheats (2008).