There are a lot of sandwiches out there.

It makes sense. If a sandwiches are anything between two pieces of bread, then the permutations are nearly endless.

Even the bread. How many kinds of bread are there? I’m not sure. I haven’t done that research yet. Maybe I could ask Google right now, but that’s a topic that I feel requires a lot of slow burning insight and questioning. What about flat breads, tortillas, hot dog buns? Do they count? We’ll figure all that out later.

Fillings? Cold? Hot? Liquid!? What order to put them in!!?

These are all things that require a pretty deep dive, but we’re going to have to start with the basics. 

One of the dumbest things about sandwiches is their alleged origin. If you look it up, sources will say that the Sandwich gets its name from James Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. The legend has it that in the mid-late 1700s, the Earl, who was a stalwart gambler, didn’t want to get up to eat or get his hands dirty while playing cards. He would ask for salt beef between two pieces of toasted, sliced bread. His pals thought it looked pretty good (obviously) and asked for ‘the same as Sandwich’.

Now the idea that this old English dandy was the first dum dum to put meat between bread and ‘invent’ the sandwich, is offensive. In the 10,000 plus years that bread existed previously, at least one or two people around the world had likely put meat between two pieces of it. 

Nevertheless, this old aristocratic gambler gets the credit for the name (in English anyway) of a whole gigantic category of foods from around the world where anything is put between bread

I love putting things between bread and then eating those things. Coming up with new things to put in new breads. I like reading about new sandwiches from around the world.  Photos of sandwiches. I love talking to friends about sandwiches as long as they will let me.

To quote iconic Canadian children’s performer Fred Penner: “Sandwiches are beautiful, sandwiches are fine. I like Sandwiches, I eat them all the time. I eat them for my supper and I eat them for my lunch. If I had 100 sandwiches, I’d eat them all at once.”