The sandwich is one or two slices of bread with a different food on top or between them. It is one of the few foods to be connected with a date and a person. In this case it is connected to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who, in the 18th century, is supposed to have asked for his meat to be placed between two slices of bread so that he could continue playing cards while eating. The bread kept the greasiness of the meat off his fingers and so did not spoil the cards.

The idea of some kind of wrapper for food is, of course, much older than that, and can be found all over the world. Sandwiches using just one slice of bread with the other food on top are well known as Smorgasbord across Scandinavia, and belegde broodje in the Netherlands, and known as 'open sandwiches' across the English-speaking world.

But the reason the sandwich has become connected to two slices of bread with a filling is the way that it caused great changes in the way upper class people behaved. The idea that you could eat without getting grease on fingers was taken up by polite upper class society in Europe and America. The filling, size and shape of the sandwich, and when it was eaten, then all became part of a ritual. In 19th century polite society, as it was called, ladies would entertain one another to afternoon tea and serve very thin buttered sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and often filled with cucumber. Here the idea was that the food did not smell, and was not filling.

At the same time, middle and lower class people began to make sandwiches for a completely different reason. By the nineteenth century, there were more and more people working in factories and shops where there was no time allowed to find food from outside. As a result, sandwiches were brought in to the factory because they were easy to carry, not messy, and quick to eat.

A club sandwich (originally clubhouse sandwich) is a much thicker kind of sandwhich. It is a sandwich of 3 pieces of toasted bread with two layers of filling, separated by the third piece of bread. Because this makes the sandwich more difficult to eat, it is cut into quarters and held together by cocktail sticks. These sandwiches always used to have chicken, iceberg lettuce, pork bacon, and tomatoes with mayonnaise.

Sandwiches use slices of bread. Any hot item based on a bread roll is a burger.