The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?

The Peter Moylan entity posted thusly:

When I lived in northern France, my apartment was directly above a bakery. Aside from the incredible smell of baking bread, the other advantage to the place was that I could get bread (yes, fresh-baked) on Sunday. They used to put in a dozen or so loaves on Sunday morning, to be given to close friends. Other folks had to make do with day-old stuff.

I don't think one should underestimate people's awareness of poetic force in everyday language. These things stick because they're in some way stylish. Nobody uses, for example, "the best thing since old-age pensions", or "...polio vaccine", or "...the Supply of Goods Act 1973" in a general context, tremendous boons though they are: the comparisons just aren't witty, or pithy, or ironic enough to catch the imagination.

That sounds close to both slicing one's cake and leaving it intact! But I do understand the point you make.

Huh.... I've never bought "french" bread in the USA which didn't have a typically French crisp crust and soft interior.

Wonder where/what brands you've been buying???

In fact, the french "style" is such a cliche in the US that the bread can be TERRIBLE as long as the crust is crisp 'n crusty . . .

Leave it to American bread factories to go for the surface characteristics but still make bad bread.

Alan __________________________________

Our President Speaks: "I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."-Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

If you like croissants and baguettes and can find a Vietnamese bakery in your area, you'll probably find that they are both very perfect and very much in the French tradition of great bread.

I learned to love real croissants and real French bread while I spent a few weeks in France many years ago. And I'm really sad to report that, mostly, what passes for those things here in the USA is too bad to want to buy. They have figured out how to put 'croissant flavoring' in things that look like croissants, but are bread.

...and like that!

Alan __________________________________

Our President Speaks: "I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."-Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

Nope, it's a long, thin loaf of simple but exquisite bread with a thick 'n crunchy crust which is delicious with butter on it.

Alan ____________________________________ Bushisms: "We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure."

-George W. Bush, Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003

Same here in St. Paul. They make perfect croissants, too!

And, their "rolls" are used to make what they just call "sandwich" which has some bits of stuff in them which are quite alien to us USA-ans, but which are delicious. The only variation on the sandwich is that you can get one with "extra meat" -- even that amount is so small that it's a laugh for us who are used to the "pile it on and call it regular" approach.

But the croissants, the bread, and the sandwiches are some of the best food I've ever had!

Alan

...who is enjoying being retired....

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Wonder if there is a disconnect here: All shops around me sell (also) all shapes of plastic-bagged, hence obligatorily mushy stuff with a

Well, given the mind-boggling domination of the sliced white, and sometimes brown, but always factory-prepared and soft, variety on which UK (well, London; can't speak for the rest) bread market, I understand why there's no sarcasm here. It took me *months* to find viable alternatives to living on crumpets. (Yeah, factory-made, too, but at least tasty, and they had novelty-value for me.)

Chris Waigl who has now found TWO places that make normal bread not, like, four or six within 100 yards of her place like in Paris, but it's a beginning

Living on a shoe-string, eh?

Having seen our local bakery install a slicing machine to slice their own bread, I have never takn it to mean factory-wrapped stuff like Wonder Bread (American national brand of substance best dampened with wter and rolled into little balls for baiting fish hooks)

In America sliced bread became common not long before I was a tad. ************* DAVE HATUNEN ( snipped-for-privacy@cox.net) ************* * Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow * * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

I dunno - hasn't that practice been banned by PETA?

In our last episode, , the lovely and talented Peter Moylan broadcast on alt.usage.english:

I made baguettes at Texas French Bread for about as long as I could stand it

-- about a year (and it is as well I gave it up because I developed, without knowning it, an occupational disease from the constant contact with yeast and dough). We had a gas-fired oven the size of a small apartment which was Texas French Bread's jewel, as it had been imported at great price and had to be refitted to work with locally available fuel and electricity (the electricity was necessary to operate the Ferris-wheel-like device which moved the bread in the oven to assure even baking. The result was that no one person living knew exactly how it worked. A think that never worked as it was supposed to was whatever provision had been made to keep the humidity in the oven up. To get around this, the bread master used a garden hose with a spray nozzle to add moisture to the oven.

There was a legend that the bakery had once thought of going kosher-for-passover for one day to make passover specialties, but the Rabbi took one look at that oven and threw up his hands. Oy! So although we continued to make challah the rest of the year, there was no more talk of kosher-for-passover.

One surprise I experienced when I served as bread master was the roar of the bread as it stood in racks after it came out of the oven. That was a good sign, I was told, because the best bread has a finely crazed surface, and if the baguette does not crackle as it cools, it has not been done properly.

It is not so much that it is stale in the sense of old white bread. It is very glutinous and tough when fresh and it continues to toughen, so when it is a day old you cannot get your teeth into it, even if you have your own teeth. A day old loaf, if uncut, will not be dry and brittle like stale white bread, but will have the consistency and edibility of leather. It still makes a good base for canapes if sliced very thin and toasted or makes substantial bread crumbs, croutons, etc. That is too say, the stuff has not become nasty and infested in so short a time as a day, its only that it is useless as bread after more than a few hours.

A baguette, a little cheese, a bottle of wine, and making love will fairly sustain two people for a day or one if there is no wine nor cheese nor love.

Local bakeries usually make much better bread than factories, and many of them Actually Have Slicers.

Too right!

Alan Moorman

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DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD UNTIE!

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Hatunen wrote: [...]

As I've said, my intuition is that "sliced bread" refers to the ready-sliced and wrapped stuff, not to classical bread which a baker has put through his machine. That's bread which has been sliced, rather than "sliced bread". I'm not at all sure that it even refers primarily to reasonable-quality bread which comes sliced and packed. In Britain at any rate, the first branded factory-sliced bread was the horrid kind ("Wonderloaf"? Maybe "Mother's Pride") and that's the image which the phrase brings to my mind: ICBW, but I don't think you could generally get it _except_ in the sliced form, so "sliced" was part of its definition.

When I was twenty and poor and in a far place (Little Ark Rockinsaw), my friend and I would wander the streets accumulating impressions and hunger. On the numerous occasions we managed this at appropriate hours, we'd find our way to the local bakery of Sliced Bread (Wonder) at the time the bread was still hot and unsliced. For twenty cents the friendly baker would sell us an unsliced loaf so hot it melted the wax on the spotted W'bread wrapper he provided. For a block or two and an hour or two we were happy and un-hungry.

I remember learning the difference between French bread and anyone else's was that it contained no milk products.

Frank ess wrote: [...touching tale of privation bravely borne snipped...]

Not sure about milk products, but the reason French and other bread doesn't keep is that it's very lean: the classic English-type bread has, IIRC, an ounce of lard to a pound or two of flour.

In this thread there is very little history given re the OP, so to fill in that part of the story:

A newspaper in 1950 claimed to identify the first loaf of sliced bread; see

Not at all. For making sandwiches (say for your kids' lunches), sliced bread was an amazing time saver and also more economical (since you couldn't consistently slice it that thin).

The phase first shows up in the _Los Angeles Times_ in 1955:

The question now resolves into one of trying to figure out whether the Santa Anita Derby fits into Finnegan's plans. If it does, Blue Ruler is the best thing since slice bread. [2/14/1955]

Three of the first four hits, in 1955 and 1956, are from the same author, Ned Cronin. The fourth is describing Wash-'n-Dri towlettes:

Alan Chudacoff, the pharmaceutical phenom who operates the famous Chudacoff Pharmacy in THE FARMERS MARKET at West Third and Fairfax, has come into possession of another shipment of the greatest thing since sliced bread. [7/18/1955]

There's a slightly earlier hit in the _New York Times_ that treats it as an understatement, but with no hint that it's sarcastic:

And it took an American to put the latest form of air travel in its place when he was asked, on arriveing in a Comet jet liner from Rome, how he liked the new machine. "Why," he said, "it's the greatest thing since sliced bread." [12/7/1952]

And that seems to tie up the thread nicely.

Actually, one thing I liked about Paris was that I could eat so cheaply. It cost me a fortune in rent to live in Montmartre in what might as well have been a garret. (It was good enough for me, but would have been hopeless for anyone who liked swinging cats.) The food, however, was plentiful and cheap. I had my main meal of the day at my employer's cafeteria, which was heavily subsidised as appears to be common in France, so I could get a steak, salad, dessert, and a half-bottle of wine for something like 10 francs. Then I'd be OK with a simple sandwich in the evening. Now and then I'd go to a restaurant for a change, but even there good food was cheap when compared with Australian restaurants.

The wine gave me problems, though. A good thing about Australian wine is that even the cheap stuff is drinkable, provided that you avoid the real horse piss at the bottom of the scale. Good French wine is remarkably good, as we all know, but bad French wine is abominably bad, and you need some expertise or local knowledge to know what to avoid. I never had bad wine at a restaurant, but I had some bloody awful stuff from the supermarket. It cleaned out my drains good and proper.