Trencher Denying

If there’s one thing that people know about Medieval bread is that people used to use bread instead of plates and eat off of it.

This is a great bit of SCA theater that really draws you into the era. I mean, it’s great to be able to do something so very easy that is also very alien to our modern sensibilities that it pulls us into that fantasy world and out of the modern. And eating your stew off a stale slice of bread does this very well.

But I’m going to call shenanagins. At least for the common folk.

It just doesn’t seem practical to me, and practicality matters to people living in a marginal environment. Certainly people used bread to soak up and mop up every last bit of soup, porridge, pottage or broth. Certainly, soup, stew or broth (or even milk, ale or water) were used to soften and flavor stale or fresh bread. A lack of waste would be the goal.

Trenchers seem wasteful to me. Or at least you have to be very careful to not be wasteful. If you pour soup or stew that is going to be liquid enough to soak into the whole trencher, some is going to soak through onto your table/eating board/bowl. If it is thick enough to not soak through, there are going to be large parts of the bread (ie. the edges and corners) that don’t get softened.

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, in her book, The History of Food, claims, “Soup, in fact, derives from ‘sop’ or ‘sup’, meaning the slice of bread on which broth was poured.”

My Webster’s (Third New International Unabridged) Dictionary says for the etymology of Sop: “a piece of food (such as bread) dipped or steeped before being eaten” and “the liquid into which food is dipped before being eaten”. For Sup, it gives several different meanings: From the Old French soupe meaning “a piece of bread soaked in broth, soup” but under another definition, from the Old English, Old Norse, Old High German and Middle High German, “to sip, to drink, to swallow”.

Even going with the Old French definition I don’t think that proves that Soup = Trencher.

Now we know that trenchers were used by the nobility and maybe even during festivals, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Everyday, common usage by everyday, common folk is what this blog is about and how this look at trenchers should be taken.

I'll post more evidence for this as I find it.