Some date the club sandwich to a "gambling club" in Saratoga Springs in 1894 where the potato chip was also born, others think it originated in the "club cars" of the NY to Chicago rail line. (These same people proffer that Wallis Simpson was "proud of her ability to prepare" what is essentially a blt combined with a turkey sandwich and mayo. It was her first husband's insistence on having it with roast beef that opened her up to her daliience with the then King of England.) They might be right about what we've come to think of makeup of the sandwich but the act of using three pieces of bread far predates the Edwardian era. In fact it predates clubs by hundreds of years to origins in Germany. As anyone who has seen the Russell Crowe opus Gladiator knows the Huns lived in the forests. Their black bread was thick and their knives dull. They were savages whose nature was to pillage and eat more than they needed to.
Not content to have just two slices of bread they ate three. So when it came time to create a boar, fern, and tomato sandwich combined with pheasant they needed to make it thinner.They created a klub (club) specifically for this sandwich (though there is some evidence that it was also used to flatten dagwoods). Nothing fancy here just common sense to get it bite-sized. Therefore, we have from Germanic origins the term Klub Sandwich. Ironically it may have been during a visit with Hitler when the Duke and Dutchess first tasted the Klub Sandwich which they then could have brought back to Saratoga.
