I was watching an old rerun of Family Affair and Buffy is playing with some kids from the poor side of town. Or as the kid puts it “from the other side of the park.”
So Buffy’s pretending to be poor, even though in reality she is poor and just sponging off Uncle Bill.
Anyway, after playing a game of follow the leader, the main kid calls up to an open window, “Hey ma, how 'bout some bread and sugar.” And the mom tosses down a loaf of bread with sugar on it, I guess.
My question is, has anyone else heard of this? I never have. Is it just bread with sugar on it. Or is the sugar baked in the bread.
In case you’re not familiar with the show, Family Affair took place in the 60s and the kids lived with their Uncle Bill in Manhattan, in very nice flat, near Central Park.
It sounds very, very “lower class” (please don’t jump all over me with comments on how grandma used to make you kids a nice bread, butter, and sugar sammitch, it’s an old fashioned thing as well), the kind of thing really poor people used to eat when times and money were really tight and there wasn’t much else that day. So maybe that’s what was meant, to show the kids were from the poor side of town. In “To Kill A Mockingbird”, the kids were having lunch with another, I guess, poor kid who poured sugar syrup all over his food, and Scout was horrified and said WTF are you DOING? and their housekeeper hushed her right up so as not to make the kid self-conscious.
I’m very fond of cinnamon toast. My mother used to mix up brown and white sugar, cinnamon, and margarine*, and spread this on toast. I’ve learned that other people butter toast, and then sprinkle it with a mix of white sugar and cinnamon. I’ve tried it, and prefer my mother’s way of doing this. I’ve also heard of people spreading bread with butter (or margarine), sprinkling white sugar on it, and then broiling it.
*My mother is of the opinion that margarine is healthier than butter. My husband loves butter, and ever since we could afford it, we have used only butter…except when my daughter comes home. She prefers vegetable oil spreads, both for the taste and because she can’t eat a lot of animal fat. I am SO ashamed that my own daughter prefers the taste of margarine! It’s all right to use margarine for health or economic reasons…but because she prefers the TASTE?
I had it once or twice as a sprog but I believe it was very widespread in the previous generation, here at least when sweet things were thin on the ground.
I remember watching that exact episode of Family Affair when I was a kid, and trying bread-and-sugar shortly thereafter, just to see if it was any good (answer: what was there not to like?)
Yep, a favorite snack for me when growing up was margarine on toast, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. You had to get the toast right when it was done so that it’d be nice and hot, and that would melt the margarine which soaked the cinnamon so you wouldn’t get that nasty dry spice taste in your mouth. We were a blue-collar, not very well off family, and didn’t always have sweet treats in the house.
(Class and social distinctions - grew up middle class, Midwestern, in the 1970s, feed ‘butter and sugar’ sandwiches to my daughters friends at their “tea” parties.)
My mother (born 1926) once specifically mentioned to me that sugar bread was associated with poor kids while she was growing up during the Depression. I have no recollection as to why the topic came up.
My dad used to also eat bread, sugar and warmed up milk. He called it “pinaidy” but I’m not sure what the spelling is. It is quite delicious, simple dessert or for supper.
We were a professional, very well off family, with a house full of sweet treats, and cinnamon toast made the way you describe was still one of our favorites. Another was “fudge” made by creaming together margarine and powdered sugar. Mostly we (my siblings and I) just liked our sugar and fat delivered as directly as possible. Why bake it into a cake when you can just shove the butter and sugar right into your mouth? Also explains my love of candy corn.
There’s a series of books by Bernice Thurman Hunter called “Booky” set during the Depression and it has a scene where the main character is overjoyed because they could afford butter so she makes her self 2 brown sugar and butter sandwiches. I tried it to see what it was like and all I could think was “bleech”