The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Sandwich Islands

The first European to stand on the shores of Hawaii was Captain James Cook, who arrived there in 1778 and died there in 1779 after an unsuccessful attempt to abduct the king. Captain Cook introduced the words tattoo and taboo into English, both having been practices that he came across in his Pacific voyages, but there was one name that he couldn’t get into the dictionary, or even the atlas.

European explorers loved to name the places that they discovered, a habit that didn’t always endear them to the natives, who felt that they must have discovered the place first as they were already living there. So, although Cook noted down that the locals called his new discovery Owyhee, he knew which side his bread was buttered and decided to rename the place in honour of the sponsor of his voyage. Captain Cook was, of course, thinking of his future career (something that he should probably have considered when abducting the king), for Cook’s sponsor was, at the time, the First Lord of the Admiralty: John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.

But the name Sandwich didn’t stick, and Cook died before his sponsor could even hear of the attempt. The poor Earl of Sandwich has had to make do with the South Sandwich Islands (an uninhabited chain of rocks near the South Pole), Montague Island (an uninhabited island near Alaska), and every sandwich shop, sandwich-maker, and sandwich filling in the entire world. And he managed that latter feat without ever going near a breadknife.

The Earl of Sandwich was a gambler, and not just any sort of gambler. He was an addict who lost money hand over fist over hand over fist. Even by the British standards of the time he was considered a bit odd, and the British were famous for gambling. The first and only account of the origin of the world’s favourite snack comes from a French book of 1765 about what terrible gamblers the English are. It runs thus:

The author didn’t mention the name of the minister, because he was a Frenchman writing for a French audience in French;[23] so there would be no point in his explaining the origin of an English word. It’s therefore a delicious twist in the tale that sandwich is now one of the few English words that everybody in France knows too.

There’s a myth that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich. He did not. He had servants and chefs to actually make his food for him. Sandwich simply made sandwiches cool. People have almost certainly been stuffing things between two slices of bread since the stuff was invented around the end of the last ice age. What the Earl of Sandwich did was to take a humble little snack that you wouldn’t think twice about, and give it associations of aristocracy, power, wealth, luxury and 24-hour gambling.

Great men and women do not busy themselves in the kitchen hoping to achieve the immortality that can be conferred by a recipe book. They simply wait until a food is named after them. Take Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna, Queen of Italy and wife of Umberto I. She never climbed Mount Stanley, but Mount Stanley’s highest peak still bears her name. She certainly never cooked any pizzas: they were made for her, and they had to be fit for a queen.

Italian aristocrats of the nineteenth century didn’t eat pizza. It was peasant food, flavoured with that peasant favourite: garlic. However, in the 1880s, European royalty, wary of revolution, were all trying to be nice to the common men whom they ruled. So when King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples, the home of the pizza, a man named Raffaele Esposito decided to make a pizza fit for the lips of the queen.

Esposito was the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Così, and he got over the garlic problem by simply not using any garlic, an idea that was previously unheard of. He then decided to make the pizza properly patriotic and Italian by modelling it on the colours of the flag: red, white and green. So he added tomatoes for the red (nobody had done this before), mozzarella for the white, and herbs for the green. He then named it Pizza Margherita and sent it, in June 1889, to the queen.

To be honest, Queen Margherita probably didn’t deign to eat the first margherita, but she did have one of her servants write a note saying thank you. Thus has her name become immortal, and a coded version of the Italian flag is on the menu of every pizza restaurant in the world.

The Italian flag consists of three vertical stripes. This design is based on le Tricolore, the flag of the French Revolution.