Trenchers

We've talked about bread before, way back here and more recently here, but now I want to discuss a very specific use for bread: the trencher.

The trencher existed for a very simple reason: plates were expensive. Serving food to individuals was more efficiently done if each person had a flat surface on which their food could be set in front of them. What do you use for a plate? Ceramic or pewter were expensive to make and own, but the ubiquity of using grains for bread led to a solution.

Once bread goes stale, it is firm and (if the menu does not include items with too much liquid) perfectly capable of supporting a meal. Trenchers were "scalable" as well, although they were generally made for an individual.

To make a trencher did not require refined flour. You wanted it to be coarse. Also, it was not necessarily edible. You weren't going to make it with your best wheat flour. You'd use barley, oats, rye, or a combination of them. Also, it didn't need to rise as much as a regular loaf: you want it to be dense. Then the real different part: you didn't want it to be fresh. You wanted it to be stale. What few recipes exist that explain the process make it clear that it was a flattened round loaf, allowed to sit for three days, then was sliced across the middle to make two halves, top and bottom. Each of these was a "trencher," from the Old French tranchier, "to cut."

This could now be placed in front of a dinner guest on which they would pile the meat and other foods (N.B.: no soup course here). In some medieval woodcuts and other pictures, you may now recognize them as the round items, often with crossed lines on top as decoration (which the guest would never see, since the top half would be used upside-down.

It was considered improper to eat the trencher at a feast. What, then, was its final fate? After all, despite the stale nature, it was now soaked with juices from meat and vegetables, so surely it wasn't rock-hard and would have some flavor? Yes, but not for refined company. The trenchers were given to the dogs or distributed to the poor, waiting outside the gates for this largesse.

So that is why the story of the death of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, makes sense (if we are willing to believe Aelred of Rievaulx).

Ah, bread! Staple of life. So important that its price had to be regulated, and that's what Henry III did for his people. I'll say more on that tomorrow.