[Sca-cooks] Sandwich (was Sugar and cheese)

[Lonnie D. Harvel]

> In my opinion, sandwiches in period are an open question, unproven and 
> possible unprovable.  Blaming the bread for sandwiches not being eaten 
> in period is merely a demonstration of illogic and ignorance.
>
> Bear 

Thanks, Bear! Life is filled with variety, and only a small portion of 
it gets documented.

Though it is certainly fair to say that John Montagu popularized this 
form of eating among the gentry of England in 1762, placing small pieces 
of food between pieces of bread, placing them on top of bread (open 
faced sandwiches), and stuffing them into bread (pocket sandwiches), all 
existed long before this date. There is always Rabbi Hillel and the 
Koreich, this dates back to the Second Temple Period, or the 1st Century 
BCE. Today you put maror and charoset between two pieces of matzah. 
Hillel took two pieces of matzah, the maror and the meat of the Korban 
Pesach (lamb) and made a "sandwich" at his Sedar. The Rabbis of the day, 
however, felt that the individual tastes of the components would be lost 
if eaten together, so they ruled that they must be eaten separately. (I 
had to look it up, but the ruling is in Pesachim 115a).  The Hillel 
Sandwich still survives, and is eaten later in the meal or with the 
leftovers.

In Mark Morton's article _Bread and Meat for God's Sake_, /Gatronomica, 
Summer 2004, /he wrote:

    What, then, were sandwiches called before they were sandwiches?
    After combing through hundreds of texts, mostly plays, that were
    written long before the Earl of Sandwich was even born, a possible
    (though somewhat prosaic) answer emerges. The sandwich appears to
    have been simply known as "bread and meat" or "bread and cheese."
    These two phrases are found throughout English drama from the
    sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, in an anonymous
    late sixteenth-centry play called /Love and Fortune/, a young man
    pleads for "a peece of bread and meat for Gods sake". Around the
    same time, in /The Old Wives Tale/ by George Peele, a character
    confesses, "I tooke a peece of bread and cheese, and came my way."
    Shakespeare uses the phrase, too, in /The Merry Wives of Windsor/,
    where Nim announces, "I love not the humour of bread and cheese." A
    slightly later anonymous play, known as /The Knave in Grain/,
    includes a pedlar called a "bread and meat man" in its dramatic
    personate, and Thomas Heywood's seventeenth-century version of /The
    Rape of Lucrece/ includes a song made up  of the cries of street
    pedlars, including, "Bread and - meat - bread - and meat." Dozens of
    other plays from the same era also make reference to "bread and
    meat" or "bread and cheese."  

(Does anyone, by chance, have the whole article? I had a copy, but I 
cannot find it after the move. I took this quote from another sandwich 
discussion. Any one have this book? 
http://www.wordhistories.com/cupboard.htm )

Ran into this will looking for the Hillel reference: "In the 20th 
century, the revivers of the Hebrew Language discussed what word should 
be used for a 'sandwich.' It was first suggested that it be called a 
'Hilleleet,' after Hillel. Later, they settled for 'Karikh' after 
'Koreikh,' the sandwich that Hillel created. Today, Israelis call it a 
'Sandvitch.' It is truly a shame that the sandwich did not become known 
as a 'Hilleleet.' " - Rabbi Mordechai Friedfertig

Shalom!
Aoghann