(all are excerpts from Jeffrey Kacirk's "Forgotten English" 2002)
thumb-bucka
"A thick slice of bread on which butter is spread with the thumb instead of
a knife."
-Sidney Addy's "Glossary of Sheffield Words" 1888
November 19th
Feast Day of St. Elizabeth, a thirteenth-century patroness of bakers,
canonized because she turned bread into roses.
Dr. Andrew Boorde, a physician to Henry VIII, had little good to say about
the "staff of life." He wrote in his "Dyetary of Helth (1542):"
"Bread made of wheat maketh a man fat, especially
when the bread is made of new wheat. Evil bakers
will put wheat and barley together; bread made of
these aforesaid corns may fill the gut, but shall
never do good to man, no more than bread made of
beans and pease will do. Hot bread is unwholesome
to any man, for it doth lie in the stomach like a
sponge, yet the smell of new bread is comfortable
to the head and heart. Old or stale bread doth dry
up the blood, or natural moisture in man, and doth
engender ill humours, and is evil and tardy of
digestion; wherefore is no surfeit so evil as the
surfeit of eating naughty bread."
Obviously, Dr. Boorda did not have the benefit of knowing the folk at Bread
Bakers Digest!