Cutting it fine

The Tea Table (1920) - Harold Harvey

I had a pretty lousy night last night, and found myself blearily scrolling through social media early this morning, having tried, unsuccessfully, to get back to sleep.

This was how I stumbled upon this tweet from journalist and art historian Richard Morris, asking for feedback from his followers on the practice of buttering the bread loaf before slicing it.  It seems that he was aware of the practice (it's mentioned in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), but thought it might have been a more local tradition, limited, perhaps, to the West Country, where he had documentation.

Wha-a-a??  I said to myself (silently, so as not to disturb the Resident Fan Boy -- which was damned nice of me, considering that it was his snoring that was partially responsible for my sleep deprivation).

First off, it's not that clear from the painting how this buttering was managed.  Fortunately, Morris got hundreds of replies, which you can read if you follow the link.  The followers writing in were remembering mums and grans from all over Britain, but especially the West Country -- and Wales. Many said that it was for economy; the butter made it easier to slice the bread thinly, and that today's bread, made by the Chorleywood method, would fall to pieces, if buttered or sliced in such a way.

I quizzed Demeter when I went over to set up her lunch.  She didn't remember her Welsh grandmother or her Wolverhampton grandmother buttering a loaf in that fashion, but did say that the Welsh loaves were startling:  large with rounded tops.

I went home and questioned the Resident Fan Boy, because I wondered if the technique made it to Canada, and if his grandmother, a farmwife in Alberta, buttered the bread this way. Not only did he not recall the women in his family doing such a thing, but, damn his eyes, he refused to believe such a thing was done!  Showing him the painting did not convince him, but when I had him read some of the Twitter replies, pulled up the passage from Great Expectations, and googled "buttering loaves before slicing", he came around.  (How very dare he!  He knows me well enough that I would have checked!)

I came to the sad conclusion that the generations of our respective families who would have known the answer have slid beyond our questions.  If yours haven't, ask -- and write it down.