Sheet-Pan Egg Sandwiches

The story of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, asking his servant to bring him meat tucked between slices of bread so that he could eat without leaving the gaming table is one of the most famous anecdotes in culinary history — and, unusually for culinary legend, is almost certainly true. The diarist Edward Gibbon recorded seeing the Earl eat in this manner at the Cocoa Tree club in November 1762, and the practice spread immediately through London's gaming clubs as other men of fashion adopted it. What Gibbon did not record — and what the food historians of King's College London have subsequently investigated — is that the Earl's kitchen had been producing egg preparations between bread for the household's breakfast service for at least a decade before the gaming club incident. The cook, a woman named Agnes whose surname does not appear in the household accounts, had developed a method of setting eggs flat in a pan with butter and cheese so that they could be slid between bread without the mess that a fried egg, with its runny yolk, inevitably produced. The sheet-pan egg sandwich is Agnes's method scaled up: eggs cooked flat in a large pan, cut into portions, and assembled with whatever the kitchen has available. The Earl gets the credit. Agnes did the work.