The Breadcrumb Trail

A year or so ago we bought one of those bread boards that has wooden slats and a tray underneath to catch the breadcrumbs when you cut the bread. I had always thought of it as a mess-saving contraption which stops the crumbs scattering in all directions over the work-surface but the other day it occurred to me (ok, I'm slow!) that what I was looking at was, in actual fact, the original bread-recyling device.

In other words, the real intention of this breadcrumb-catching tray was to capture the breadcrumbs in order to save them for later use as...well...breadcrumbs. It got me thinking that, indeed, I could amass quite a large amount of breadcrumbs that way, supplementing the bags of stale bread we normally save for the purpose of those recipes that require dipping in breadcrumbs or thickening with them. (Spain has quite a large number of breadcrumb-based recipes, not least the infamous 'migas' which are fried breadcrumbs usually mixed with sardines. See below for details of how to make them in our new series of Leftover Bread recipes.)

I must admit I've always wondered at the bags of breadcrumbs for sale in supermarkets. It seems to me such an odd thing to buy. I try to imagine the type of person who doesn't have a bit of stale bread that they can turn into breadcrumbs when they need to. Or alternatively, someone with such a vast consumption of breadcrumbs that the stale bread they do have goes nowhere near satiating their demand for breadcrumb production. The inevitable conclusion is that in fact those people do have stale bread - and enough of it to satisfy their dipping and thickening needs - but they simply lob it into the bin and when they need breadcrumbs, they go and buy them in a packet. The mental connection between the bread and the crumbs is lost to them.

Once again, all this seems to lead back to the divorce in our society between production and consumption as well as - given that according to a recent survey, one third of all food bought in the UK is thrown away - to the unprecedented affluence in which many of us are living. In the days when we baked our own bread, it was a valuable commodity achieved by our own sweat and hard work and so every last morsel was precious and saving the crumbs was an obvious thing to do. Likewise the intrinsic worth of bread was very high for not only was it a staple food but one which many could barely afford and hence whose crumbs were not to be wasted. Now, with 'bread' being just one more thing written on our supermarket list, it doesn't seem that odd to add 'packet of breadcrumbs' as well.

You can read the details of what a previous government exhorted us to do about this issue by clicking on the image above.

For a more contemporary view go to: LoveFoodHateWaste.com

And to tickle your tastebuds further: Migas: The first in our new series of Leftover Bread Recipes!