One of our favorite sandwich places went out of business, and they had a wonderful muffuletta. Oh, how I miss that sandwich!
Even if the place were still open, I wouldn’t be able to have one. Salt has been banished forever from my diet!
~VOW
Before the advent of plastic bags, the bread bags were waxed paper and didn’t seal very well. Leaving the end pieces on the loaf had a much bigger effect in keeping the rest of the bread fresh. They really were in a small way “sacrificial” pieces that would go stale first and were never fit for sandwiches. My mother would feed them to the birds.
I have a vague memory that must’ve been after the first time we got bread in a plastic bag. Our family actually was slightly surprised and pleased that the heels remained edible.
Agreed. Like the apocryphal tale of cutting the ends off the roast, this might have been useful advice in 1950 or even 1960. But now? Nope. Just a dumb habit.
To be fair, today I opened up a bag of Brownberry white bread I hadn’t used in about three days, and the heel was gone, for some reason. The piece of bread that would normal abut the heel was, in fact, noticeably dried out on one side. I thought of this thread, was going to post it, starting typihg it, then got bored midway, but now that it’s been brought up again, that’s my empirical observation and conforms to my experience in general. It does not affect the freshness of the whole loaf, no, not at all. Just that last piece. And if you toast it, it doesn’t really mattter.
I don’t eat crusts. Ever. I leave them for my sister. The only way I would potentially eat them if I were starving is toasted open face. Then, spread with butter and peanut butter.
BTW, a friend of mine who grew up in Hong Kong called the ends of the loaf the “skin.”
In my family we called the end pieces of long italian/baguette type loaves, the “Nose”
According to Paul Dickson’s Family Words one family called an end piece to a loaf of bread the “bunce”
My sister’s three sons made up some words/definitions. The youngest son asked his brothers what the sponge-on-a-stick thing used for washing dishes was called. His brother, without batting an eye, said, “that’s a douche”. Other brother joined in, saying he couldn’t believe he didn’t know that.
It made sense to little brother, who heard older kids call someone a douche. It was many years before he figured it out. My sister played along, so did other relatives.