I don’t associate cinnamon toast with bread/butter/sugar–the former was (and is) a legitimate breakfast food and the latter was only served by my grandmother as an after school treat. She also made me bread & butter & molasses, which I actually prefer, and which I haven’t tasted in 30 years. I bet it’s still good, though. I wonder if it will work with whole grain wheat bread, Promise Light spread, and molasses. May have to do some experimenting . . .
The advantage of mixing up the butter, sugar, and cinnamon beforehand is that the cinnamon will automatically get soaked.
I grew up working class midwestern. We ate brown sugar sandwiches a lot of times for an after school snack. Just bread, butter (or margarine) and brown sugar.
Yep. My Mom talks about having butter and sugar on bread as a little girl.
Thanks for the replies, but is it just bread and sugar?
I mean if I take some bread and put sugar on it, doesn’t the sugar just slide off. I can see if it’s bread and butter and suger, the butter will hold the sugar. Or do you have to roll the bread up after you put the sugar on it?
I’ve never tried bread and sugar, but isn’t most bread rather full of holes? Seems it’d hold a layer of sugar pretty well.
Course, butter and sugar sounds a lot better.
From what I’ve heard, you sprinkle sugar on the bread and put it under the broiler, where it melts and forms a crust.
Damn, I am getting this urge for a sugar sandwich, but as a diabetic it would be disasterous … I need something with actual nutrition along with the calories…
I was given buttered bread with granulated sugar sprinkled on it when I was very young. It was something my great grandma did. It’s not like it was tasty either. No heating or melting was involved. I’m sure there was a variation without the butter.
My mom grew up right after the Depression and had lots of siblings and grandparents living in the house as well, and she used to eat bread spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar. Another “treat” (and I use that term loosely) my grandmother used to serve was lime Jello with milk poured over it and a liberal coating of sugar dumped on top. Eeewwww . . . I hated that. My mom also used to make cream chipped beef on toast, which she said she had all the time when she was a kid, and that was the worst ever; in fact, my sister and I hated it so much that my mom finally stopped making it.
The grossest thing I’ve heard of, though, was my mom’s cousin rolling entire sticks of butter in sugar and then eating the entire stick. Bleah. Guess it didn’t hurt her too bad, though–she’s well into her 70s now and fairly healthy.
Oh, sorry, when I read that, I immediately thought bread and butter with sugar. So nope, I don’t recall ever hearing about people eating just bread and sugar.
We used to sprinkle a little water on the bread to make the sugar stick sometimes.
My best friend in high school was one of seven children (three older than her and three younger), and her parents were divorced. Her father either couldn’t or wouldn’t give the mother enough money to support the children properly. While we had our rough years when I was growing up, my mother had a financial support system, this girl’s mother apparently had no such thing.
As a result, they ate “poor people food” a lot. Breakfast was often a loaf of bread (for the family, not per person), a bowl of margarine and a bowl of either granulated or powdered sugar to sprinkle on the bread. Sometimes, if cash flow was good, they put applesauce and brown sugar on bread; sounds weird, but I don’t guess it’s a whole lot different from apple butter.
They had something made with dried beans for supper a lot, too. Meat was pretty much a once-or-twice-a-week thing.
I’m going downstairs to make myself some cinnamon sugar toast for breakfast now… that’s all I’m hungry for thanks to this thread.
Yum.
My father still enjoys Jello (usually strawberry) with cream or milk poured over it. He’s going to be 78 on the 17th. Considering that many people now top Jello with whipped cream, pouring cream and sugar on top of Jello is probably what people did before ReddiWhip.
When I was a teen, I babysat a lot. One of the kids I watched used to eat butter by itself if he was left to his own devices…his mother warned me about this, and sure enough, several times I caught him trying to eat butter.
However, consider this…buttercream frosting is nothing more than butter, shortening, sugar, a little milk, and a little vanilla extract. Your mom’s cousin was just skipping the shortening and extract.
I havent thought about this in years but my mom used to make me “sugar toast.” It was bread with butter and sugar and toasted in a toaster oven. The sugar forms a crust. It was very good. My mom was born in 1930.
I guess I grew up poor. The night before the OP was posted, I made my family’s version of cinnamon toast. Margarine on white bread with sugar sprinkled on top in a continuous layer with cinnamon sprinkled in blotches on top, then tossed in the broiler. Delicious! My version is butter on Oroweat 7 grain, and it’s great when there’s nothing else to eat in the house.
Other variations:
Soda cracker with butter and sugar
Soda cracker and vanilla ice cream
I vaguely remember trying a bread, butter, and sugar sandwich after seeing that episode of Family Affair (I call it “The One Where Buffy and Uncle Bill Go Slumming.” It was notable for having Jackie “Uncle Fester” Coogan as a guest star.) I grew up in Minneapolis, in a very lower-middle-class family.
I don’t recall being especially enamoured with it (I would always rather have had a baloney sandwich instead). I probably tried it after asking my mother, a child of the Depression, if she’d ever had one. I was told she had, and that she also had an uncle-by-marriage who enjoyed having crackers in milk as a late night snack.
When my daughter was growing up, I made buttered cinnamon toast for her almost every morning, using brown (raw) sugar instead of white. SFAIK, she still loves it.
In Paris, they serve crepes with butter and sugar.