King Charles Can Only Have Circle Sandwiches Because Of A Centuries-Old Superstition

There is no shortage of peculiar reasons why a person might want to avoid, or alternatively, seek out, a particular type of food. For example, spilling a shaker of salt is bad luck, at least according to some people. On the other hand, if you've ever started your morning by cracking into a double-yolked egg, you are in for a good fortune. However, double-yolked eggs foreshadowed death in Norse mythology. The bubbles that form on the top of your piping hot cup of morning joe are said to indicate that a cash influx is headed your way, and in China, it's believed that if you cut a noodle, you've similarly sliced your own personal longevity. Another common belief in the poultry sphere says that you should think twice about having chicken for New Year's, in order to avoid bad luck.

However, food-centric superstitions are not exclusively the purview of the hoi polloi. In fact, even royalty is susceptible to superstition, up to and including King Charles of the U.K. himself, who is forbidden from eating square sandwiches based upon a treasonous tradition.

In the documentary "Inside the Royal Kitchen: Hidden Secrets," which is available to watch on the Real Stories YouTube channel, Graham Newbould, formerly a royal chef, shows us how he would prepare sandwiches for the royal family. While using his delicate knife skills to thinly slice bread and cucumbers for a light lunch, he explains that a historic tradition bars square sandwiches from being served to the family, as giving a royal food with an edge used to signify your intention to overthrow the monarchy. (Perhaps the point on the food represented the piercing tip of a backstabber's blade.)

Calling the sandwiches that are eaten by members of the royalty family circular is not strictly accurate. Graham Newbould barely snips the tip off of each sandwich corner with expert precision, giving it an only slightly rounded appearance. Nevertheless, the sandwich has been made sufficiently circular so as not to incite revenge from a royal perturbed by the threat of treason.

However, it's possible that another superstition contributed to the practice of cutting corners in Buckingham Palace. In "Eating Royally: Recipes and Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen," another former Royal Chef, Darren McGrady, explained that Queen Elizabeth insisted that he removed the corners from her teatime sandwiches, as anything square or rectangular reminded her of a coffin, via South China Morning Post. Apparently, the late Queen felt that serving her coffin-shaped food suggested that you wanted her health to fail.

While King Charles' mind may wander to thoughts of potential usurpers while he's eating his circular sandwiches, he might inadvertently be overlooking all the other ways in which his sandwich and its ingredients could affect his fortune. An Irish myth suggests a cross wasn't sliced into the top of his sandwich's bread before it was baked, it could be possessed by the devil, a Greek folktale tells us that smelling the basil in sandwiches' Italian dressing drizzle could cause a scorpion to grow in your brain, but he could change his fate by topping the sandwich with sliced onions, which were used by ancient Egyptians to help ward off nefarious specters — these are all freaky food superstitions.