At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

It is hard to overemphasize just how important bread was to the English diet through the nineteenth century. For many people bread wasn’t just an important accompaniment to a meal, it was the meal. Up to 80 percent of all household expenditure, according to the bread historian Christian Petersen, was spent on food, and up to 80 percent of that went on bread. Even middle-class people spent as much as two-thirds of their income on food (compared with about one quarter today), of which a fairly high and sensitive portion was bread. For a poorer family, nearly every history tells us, the daily diet was likely to consist of a few ounces of tea and sugar, some vegetables, a slice or two of cheese, and just occasionally a very little meat. All the rest was bread.