[Previous entry: "Thinks..."] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Dance Dance Revolution!"]
09/18/2001 Archived Entry: "Bread"
When I was busy working as a fruit a few weeks back, there was a time when we were lounging around a cafe half dressed up waiting to get some tea. A friend pointed at a sign on the wall which made reference to the Earl of Sandwich and how he first invented the sandwich. He then asked me an astoundingly insightful question.
"What was bread used for before sandwiches?"
I paused, and wondered about this. What indeed did they use bread for? Did they just eat it on its own, or did they put butter and other foods on top of it? Is a sandwich with only one slice of bread still a sandwich? These strange, unbidden thoughts whirled throughout my mind as a whole new universe of possibilities and questions opened up to me. About ten seconds later, we were told that we had to get back to work and I promptly forgot about all of it.
Recently the question resurfaced in my mind and I've been asking various people for their opinions.
"What was bread used for before sandwiches?"
Answers ranged from, "Don't be silly," to "They used it for plates," and the more sensible, "Bread and butter and mopping up gravy." The latter seemed most plausible but I needed some hard evidence. Clearly some serious Googling was being called for here.
It's widely told that John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, invented the sandwich because he often spent excessive amounts of time gambling and he didn't want to get up, so he told his servants to bring him meat sandwiched in between two slices of bread; this is what the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us, anyway.
However, according to acclaimed American food critic Daniel Rogov, this is not true at all - it's just another one of those just-so-stories. Apparently the Earl of Sandwich suffered a wound when he was 17, causing a gastro-intestinal disorder resulting in a condition where he could only consume liquids, not solids. Therefore, it's impossible that he could have eaten a sandwich as described in the story.
Did he invent it, though? No. When he visited France in 1748, he noticed that French landowners fed their farm workers sandwiches and he was so impressed he used the idea for his own workers - in other words, he popularised the sandwich.
Now, I presume that before sandwiches, they probably didn't put that much meat or other food on top of their bread, simply because it would have fallen off if you tried to carry it any appreciable distance. So really they could only have maybe put butter or cheese on their bread. I will also agree that they probably ate bread with gravy and soup. However, I do find it hard to believe that they ate bread+xyz for a meal in itself, where bread is the main component (i.e. bread+soup does not count).
As mentioned earlier, bread was indeed used as a plate for food - but only very stale bread will do. Once you've eaten the food on top, enough of the juices have been absorbed by the stale bread that it becomes softened and edible, so you eat that. Clearly this wasn't the fate of all bread; it's not as if you've bake bread and then purposefully wait for it to turn stale, but I would imagine that if you happened to have some stale bread lying around it would be used as a plate. You certainly couldn't use fresh bread as a plate, as it'd just disintegrate and turn into a mush.
Along with all of this, I managed to find some quotations about bread though:
‘Bread and water - these are the things nature requires. For such things no man is too poor, and whosoever can limit his desire to them alone can rival Jupiter for happiness’ -- Seneca
‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said, ‘Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed’ -- Lewis Carol
‘Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesman it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf’ -- GK Chesterton