The traditional sandwich is not yet brown bread

THE death of the sandwich due to lockdown has been declared.

But, like that of American author Mark Twain, the announcement is premature.

Sainsbury’s reports that since March, 32% of 16 to 44-year-olds have stopped eating sandwiches.

I think they mean they’ve stopped buying them, supposedly saving themselves £243 in the process.

Quite how the supermarket bosses come to this conclusion is not made clear.

Presumably, in one of those publicityseeking surveys of shoppers. It is suggested that millions of people working from home are reheating last night’s leftovers or cooking from scratch.

We do that anyway, whatever restrictive Tier we’re in at any given time. Nothing goes to waste in Mrs R’s kitchen.

But who likes eating shop-bought sandwiches? They’re never as good as those you make at home – cheese or salami with Sandra’s home-made piccalilli.

The sandwich is named after John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who invented it in 1762.

A rake and a gambler, as well as First Lord of the Admiralty and PostmasterGeneral, he created the sandwich to eat in one hand while he held his cards in the other in a 24-hour gambling session.

Of course it had existed before as the farm labourer’s bread and cheese, but the name stuck, a bit like the salad cream (remember that?) in a British Railways (and remember that?) sandwich.

Remember them too, curling gently under plastic domes in a thousand station refreshment rooms, now mostly gone? They were a standard music hall joke. Sandwiches today are a multi-millionpound industry, as well as a traditional home nourishment.

They’ll survive lockdown.

Now I’m heading for the bread bin...