The typical white, sliced sandwich bread that is ubiquitous in American homes and has been since … decades before I was born anyway. Symbolically, it’s a metaphor for the plainness and lack of imagination (and abundant sugar) in the post-1940’s American diet. And also a metaphor for simplicity and ubiquity.
Did it develop organically based on consumer tastes, advances in manufacturing, and consumer spending power? Or is it a form of an ancient bread recipe? Am I eating the overly-sweet, overly-processed American version of some ancient French doux et moelleux?
Refined wheat (white) flour was developed because whole grain flour contains fatty acids that can become rancid, reducing the flour’s shelf life. That’s why there’s white bread.
I recall my father telling me that during the Depression bakers cut corners by making cheap bread by skimping on flour and letting the bread rise so much it actually got spaces running through it (we called it airbread.)According to Dad, the government had to regulate how heavy bread had to be (1 ounce per slice.)
That minimum standard is how we got the cheap sandwich bread we all grew up with. Why they started making it sweeter is anybody’s guess - probably because unsweetened white bread is pretty bland, possibly because bakers discovered making it sweeter makes us want to eat more.
I read that sugar was a popular additive in a range of foods as it is a very cheap filler and bulker for food, and so would give you the same quantity of something to sell at pennies less per serve. That also means you can introduce more air bubbles and offset the loss of weight with added sugar.
I found a lot of American bread to be noticeably sweet, and other people have said it tastes like cake, there is so much sugar and aeration in it.
It’s just the modernized and popularized manchet.
White wheat flour ‘loaf’ bread is specifically an English food. Other cultures, including Greek, Italian, Turkish, had never used, and still don’t use ‘loaf’ bread: they use flat bread. But even cultures that used loaf bread regarded white wheat bread as an “English” thing. Eastern Europe still eats ‘black’ bread.
The bread that the English ate used to be their staple food source. As in 'what shall I eat today? Today I am eating two loaves of bread.", And “Man shall not live on ~food~ alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”. The bread had to be white (by definition), and it had to be cheap. Expensive bread has been around as long as mass-produced bread, but it existed as a contrast to food-grade bread.
The Aerated Bread Company had significant market share in the UK: they were able to make bread 10-20% cheaper than the yeast-risen process. I think that, around the turn of the century, they were the biggest bread company in the UK. The process was eventually replaced with a cheap ‘fast’ yeast-risen bread that could be made with low-protein flour, and took only about an hour to produce a cooked loaf.
So: American store bread developed as a result of price, availability, preference, but very definitely the result of technology. It changed with technology changes. And the crust is steamed: that’s both preference and technology too.
All American food is sweet, but I don’t think the bread is particularly sweet. A lot of French bread is sweet (brioche). It’s a bit salty, but I’m used to that now. It’s very soft, that’s a result of the fast process, the cheap wheat, and consumer preference: most of the store bread around here is labeled “soft” as if they are proud of it.
Like all bread products, sliced white bread is of variable quality, though it’s probably safe to say that few gourmets would favour it. I often have sliced white bread with added fiber on hand for limited purposes – like toast to have with breakfast eggs, or grilled cheese sandwiches. It has a fine taste when toasted and I’m willing to tolerate the preservatives for the long shelf life.
For some inexplicable reason untoasted white bread is, for me, the perfect basis of tuna salad sandwiches. Otherwise, I usually make my sandwiches with different kinds of buns, which are far more tasty and substantial, meaning that you can also pile on more ingredients!
Also known as paindemain, which shows up as a deliberately schlocky metaphor in Chaucer’s “Sir Thopas” (“Whit was his face as payndemayn”). (My edition of The Canterbury Tales says the modern-day equivalent would be comparing someone’s complexion to store-bought processed white bread.)
I wouldn’t say that was an accurate comparison - pandemain was a high-status thing, so not quite as insulting as calling someone Wonderbread-face
I thought white bread was a luxury thing for rich people in olden times, when poor people could only dream of ever tasting it (source: Heidi).
The Wiki link you gave earlier says:
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the English word manchet back to about 1450 and equates this type of bread with paindemain. …
Florence White’s classic English cuisine book Good Things in England, first published in 1932, contains several recipes for manchets. White gives five regional varieties of the bread and quotes from sources for the recipes. The first is from Gervase Markham in Nottinghamshire published in 1615 where White quotes an anonymous source that describes a manchet as ‘Your best and principal bread’.
There is also a reference to “Manchetts for the Queen’s Maides”, a royal ordinance originating from Eltham Palace in 1526 during Henry VIII’s reign which describes a menu for medieval aristocracy. It is inserted because a correspondent had requested when manchets were to be served at court. This suggests that in origin it was a luxurious bread containing ingredients that were available only to the wealthy. …
According to Elizabeth David, only the wealthy could have manchets for their breakfast or dinner, and these became the “ancestors” of eighteenth-century French rolls.
Seems pretty high-status to me.
That was my point. Sliced modern white bread isn’t.
I feel obligated to remind people of this:
Irish courts determined that there was so much sugar in Subway’s bread that it can’t legally be called bread.
The clincher was the act’s strict provision that the amount of sugar in bread “shall not exceed 2% of the weight of flour included in the dough”.
Subway’s bread, however, contains five times as much sugar. Or, as the supreme court put it: “In this case, there is no dispute that the bread supplied by Subway in its heated sandwiches has a sugar content of 10% of the weight of the flour included in the dough.”
Subway’s bread doesn’t seem all that sweet to me, but I’ve lived my entire life in the US (technically) so I’m sure my perspective is heavily skewed.
I just bought some Sweet Hawaiian bread to make French toast. I wanted some the other day and all we had was whole grain wheat bread that doesn’t make good French toast.