Personable history
When Charles Grey was prime minister between 1830 and 1834, the British parliament passed an act which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. Yet Earl Grey is best remembered for lending his name to a blend of black teas flavoured with essential oil of bergamot, a highly fragrant citrus fruit. Over the years, several stories have developed about the origin of the world-famous blend, and how it came to be associated with the name of Earl Grey (which, incidentally, is not a brand, nor a company name, but a type of tea). All the stories, despite disparate beginnings and middles, have the same ending: the tea blend was a gift from the representative of one empire (China’s) to the representative of another (Britain’s).
It is possible that all of these stories, and also their common ending, are apocryphal. In the view of one sceptic, the blend that became known as ‘Earl Grey’ could not have originated in China at all. Over the centuries, tea in China was flavoured with several different ingredients, but bergamot is not known to have been among them, though the fruit tree grew there. However, the assertion that the tea drunk in China is usually green, not black, as in the Earl Grey blend, is glib, as black tea is simply a processed version of green tea. In other words, it comes from exactly the same plant.
Whichever way he came by it, Prime Minister Grey liked the blend enough to ask for it to be made up for him regularly. Twinings of The Strand in London claims to have been the first to produce it. (Robert Twining, who was chairman of the London Tea Dealers’ Association, was instrumental in bringing down the exorbitant rate of excise duty on tea, some decades earlier, by lobbying with the prime minister William Pitt.) Twining still blends Earl Grey tea today, from leaves grown in India, Sri Lanka and China. Thoughtfully, in those early days Twining also produced Lady Grey, a tea blend for women, flavouring it with fruit to counteract the improper impulses tea was thought to provoke among the ladies who could afford to drink it. Jackson’s of Piccadilly also claims to have been the first to produce the Earl Grey blend, based solely on China tea. The dispute continues, though Earl Grey himself is very long dead, Twining’s and Jackson’s are both owned by the same parent company, and several other tea brands produce and market an Earl Grey blend.
Sandwich is the name of a popular fast food. It is also the name of a town, first recorded in AD640, on the coast of England, which owes its name to the Old English word sandwic, meaning ‘place on the sand’. Wic comes from vicus, a Latin word that means ‘hamlet’. The only link between the town and the two pieces of bread with a filling between them is a legendary one, involving the incompetent and corrupt John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, in the late 18th century.
The hereditary title had been created to honour John’s ancestor, Edward Montagu, who in 1660 commanded a fleet that happened to lie off the coast of Sandwich. Like Edward, John also commanded a fleet. A personal friend of the king, he was made First Lord of the Admiralty, but he achieved little more than a life riddled with vice. Though he did finance the expedition led by Captain Cook, who named the Sandwich Islands after him (they were mercifully renamed Hawaii), American Independence is at least partly due to his gross mismanagement of the Royal Navy.
The story goes that one night in 1762, the fourth Earl of Sandwich was too busy gambling to stop for a meal when he was hungry, and so he ordered some roast beef to be brought to his table. Reluctant to get his fingers greasy, or to cease playing while he ate, he asked for the meat to be placed between slices of bread. One of his biographers disputes this, claiming it is just unpleasant gossip, and that Sandwich may well have ordered the food when busy at his desk. Whatever the truth of the matter, the reality is that this style of eating meat, or other foods, between slices of bread has carried his name ever since.
The fourth Earl of Sandwich did nothing more than what peasants and labourers have done ever since bread was invented: stuff bread for ease of portability. Before the advent of the lunchbox, or after its arrival on the scene when many still could not afford to buy one, the simplest way for a workman to carry his lunch, such as it may have been, was inside a loaf. The crust, wrapped in a piece of cloth, protected the food and contained it. This, too, is why Cornish pasties developed: the pastry case was little more than a container for the actual meal of meat and vegetables inside it, for workers to take down to the Cornish mines. The significant difference, in the case of the Earl of Sandwich, is that he was an aristocrat who surprised his peers by adopting a peasant habit.
Now, as the journalist Sarah Lyall put it in an article in the International Herald Tribune, the Sandwich family has woken up to the fact that it owns one of the most famous brand-names in food history, and perhaps it should do something with it. The 11th Earl of Sandwich and his son, Orlando Montagu, have set up a company called, of course, The Earl of Sandwich. They sell very upmarket sandwiches, made with fresh ingredients from small British producers.
Tension crackles between Australia and New Zealand over who ‘owns’ the Pavlova, with both countries claiming it as a national dish. The only fact on which they agree is that it is named after Anna Matveyevna Pavlova, the illegitimate daughter of a Russian laundry-woman, who became one of the world’s greatest classical ballet dancers.
Inspired by a performance of The Sleeping Beauty, Anna Pavlova joined the Imperial Ballet School in Moscow in 1891, when she was 10. She made her debut at the Maryinski Theatre eight years later, and began dancing on tour some years after that. She visited Australia and New Zealand in the late 1920s - and then the sweet battle began.
Recipes for the Pavlova meringue began to appear shortly after the dancer toured New Zealand and Australia. A cookbook, published by E. Futter in New Zealand in 1926 and reissued in 1929, contains a recipe for Meringue with Fruit Filling. It is for a classic Pavlova, but does not use the dancer’s name. Keith Money, a biographer of Anna Pavlova, wrote in 1982 that a hotel chef in New Zealand had created the dish, inspired by the dancer’s performance in his country. Over in Australia, Herbert Sachse, another hotel chef, had said he created the Pavlova for the hotel’s afternoon tea sessions. When he presented the cake for the first time, someone supposedly remarked that it was “as light as Pavlova”, and this prompted him to name it in her honour. Pavlova had, after all, stayed as a guest at that same hotel.
The weight of evidence seems to favour the New Zealanders’ claim. In an interview in the 1970s, Herbert Sachse admitted that his Pavlova recipe was based on one called ‘meringue cake’. It had appeared in a magazine called Women’s Mirror in 1935, and was contributed by somebody who lived in New Zealand. The tiebreaker, though, is the earliest documented reference to the name Pavlova, in the context of a meringue dessert. It appeared in a cookbook called Davis Dainty Dishes, which was published, a year after Anna Pavlova danced her way across New Zealand, by Davis Gelatine New Zealand Ltd.