Word of the Week
12th May 2008
bread
A Barnsley baker has secured an unlikely contract – baking thousands of loaves of bread for the French. Foster’s will export over 7,000 square white loaves every few months for use in making toasted sandwiches, a trade that seems improbable given the high reputation of French baking.
The first types of bread were probably made from beechnuts or acorns, but by the time our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were using the word (probably of Germanic origin and meaning ‘a fragment’) grain would have long been established as bread’s main ingredient. Man’s staple food for many thousands of years, bread, unsurprisingly, plays an important role in the rituals of some religions. Passover is celebrated by Jews with the eating of unleavened bread, while Christians view the bread eaten in the Eucharist sacrament as symbolic of the body of Christ (or the body itself, in traditional Catholic belief). The Christian faith has also inspired a number of memorable phrases concerning bread: Christ himself is sometimes referred to as ‘the bread of life’; doing good without expecting an immediate reward is ‘casting one’s bread upon the waters’; while the importance of religion is summed up with the words ‘man cannot live by bread alone’.
Politics also has its fair share of bread-related expressions. To keep a populace well fed and docile with ‘bread and circuses’ has been the object of political leaders since the Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase in his Satires, while modern politicians like to think that they are aware of the ‘bread-and-butter’ concerns of their constituents. Class has always been a political issue in Britain and terms such as ‘upper-crust’ and, north of the border, ‘pan-loaf’ indicate that a person can seemingly be categorised – in these cases as upper-class - according to the bread he eats.
Such matters may be of limited interest to the employees of Foster’s, though. Their bread is longer lasting than the Gallic equivalent and this makes it more suitable for making croque-monsieur (the French version of a ham and cheese toastie). In the land of cordon bleu cookery, it seems, Barnsley brioche is regarded as the best thing since sliced bread.
Mo Just, Chambers Dictionaries
