Growing up did you have bread and butter with your evening meal?

[PersephoneParlormaid]

I was pretty much always given it, either to make a chip butty or to mop up gravy. I used to enjoy it, so might just start it again, who cares about calories!

My grandparents did but we didn't at home (I was born late 70s, northern).

Dbro and I LOVED it, it was somehow very exciting! Parents were more sophisticated cooks so it wasn't a thing but this has given me some lovely memories this morning

Yes, fish and chips, bacon & eggs, stew not with roast or pork chops.

I was born in the 60s, bread and butter, probably with a bit of jam, was our evening meal.

Yes, indeed, though I doubt my parents were thinking in those terms! They’d both grown up in households where protein was scarce because expensive and reserved for the men while women and children filled up on potatoes and cabbage or other cheap greens. My mother has had lifelong bone problems, not surprisingly.

Our vitamins as far as they were concerned came in a weekly spoonful of a revolting thing called ‘cod liver oil and orange’ out of a bottle. Which managed to taste both fishy and of synthetic orange, though I think the orange was supposed to make it more palatable!

No, never with dinner. We had high tea on Sunday which included bread and butter (margarine actually, wo-ooah Vitalite usually), cold meat such as spam or ham, sausage rolls and seasonal veg such as radishes, but dinner was always just my mum's horrible bland meals such as mince or watery casserole with lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy veg.

If we had soup for lunch (my mum was fond of serving pea soup) that would come with unbuttered bread; and there was usually toast on offer at breakfast alongside boiled eggs or cereal.

Going for tea at my best friend’s house, and then my first boyfriend’s, there was always a plate of sliced white bread with margarine on the table. The meals weren’t particularly nutritious either- lots of new convenience foods/ frozen stuff. This was late 70s/early 80s.

My parents were into whole foods, so I found it all very exciting!!

With chips yes sometimes but not with any other meal.

Yes, in the 80s, maybe less so as I got older and the meals started to change a bit. Not with everything, but more often than not.

My husband is a bit like this now. Not necessarily sliced bread and butter, but he always asking if we’re having some kind of bread product with a meal - wraps, flatbread, pitta etc, even if it’s something that really doesn’t need it.

Sometimes with a casserole but it was to mop up the delicious gravy really.

I always assumed bread and butter would be served as a cheap filler in some households. If there wasn't really enough of the main food for everyone in the family it could be boosted with some bread and butter. Sorry - a bit of a poor person thing.

I never do garlic bread with pasta. I serve enough pasta to not require another carb.

I grew up in South London in the 60s and 70s and, similar to others on this thread, I don't think serving bread and butter with meals was a thing.

The first time I was served bread and butter with a cooked meal was at the original Harry Ramsden's in Guiseley in the 1980s.

Always if it fit the meal. Not with roasts . Northern working class family with not much money . I still love a chip butty 😀

Never

I was born in ‘57. Everyone I knew had bread on the side. Lunch and dinner (or rather dinner and tea)

But portions of the more expensive food were much smaller than now.

We weren’t poor, but expectations of weekly meals were still everything from scratch, in season (picking caterpillars off cabbage before washing it, sitting at the table shelling peas or broad beans) and fairly wholesome. Lots of stews, mince. Sunday roast stretched to shepherd’s pie and finally the last scraps into rissoles. Bone being the basis of ‘brown soup’. My Mums cooking was good, it was always tasty.

Bread was an essential part of feeding a family in a budget.

The food industry and marketing have really done a number on us.

We were relentlessly middle class snobs and considered bread and butter (or marge) with everything somewhat working class. But farmers got a bye on it - they were middle class because they were landowners/running a business but needed big meals because they were doing hard outdoor manual labour.

We got it with all our boarding school meals though - white sliced bread with real butter. Delicious.

And every meal out came with a bread roll and butter, which was Different and Posh.

edited to add - born 1958

Yes we always did except on a Sunday when we had a roast.

I remember Beefeaters used to give you a bread roll and butter at the start of your meal, whatever else you'd ordered. They stopped doing it around the turn of the millennium, I think.

No.

Yes we did. 70s baby, South East, lower middle class.
Bread basket in the middle of the table with slices of brown and white bread and a tub of margarine. Mum would instruct us (kids) to eat the brown bread as it was "healthier". We would moan as dad only ever ate white but denied it! After a while mum only bought brown bread to stop the bickering.
Always salt on the table. Dad would have a pile of it on the side of his plate and dip dinner in it. We copied.
We always had a cooked pudding too.
The comments on here make me realise the bread and pudding was a traditional way of padding out smaller main meals.

Oddly after a while, circa 1981/2 the salt, bread and pudding disappeared (fruit bowl only). I think mum learned about healthy eating but it probably coincided with income increasing and being able to afford bigger portions of meat etc.

We don't have bread and butter with a meal now unless it's something like soup or if there's no other carb. I think my youngest would be delighted if we did. She would live off bread and butter (real butter not marge). When we went to Italy last year she loved how they bring a big basket of bread before you've even ordered anything and if you eat it all they refill it for free!

I grew up one of 5 in the 60s/70s and quite poor. Always had food/clothes and warm house but not much else.
Our neighbours were a family of 10 with a drunken mean bully of a father.
I was very friendly with one of the girls and sometimes got invited for tea. I was always envious of the pile of bread (and marg) on the table with the huge jugs of water.
I commented to my mum once 'why don't we have bread'.. I was about 8 and I probably whined!?
I remember her sort of exploding that I was ungrateful and didn't I realize that it was because he drank all the money and the kids were starving. Don't ever complain again.

Years later I learnt that 4 of the kids were coeliac and bread was the worst thing they could have been given.
He died very young and I remember my Mum helping the neighbour to get a bigger council house. We never saw them again.
So I associate bread on the table with the memories of my tiny thin pale friend with straw like hair and a huge round belly. Sad.

Bread and butter or bread and jam was my meal

South London in the 60s and 70s here as well. There was always B&B available if you were hungry in our house, we lived with grandparents who grew up poor with bread as a nice cheap filler.

Yes. With everything

No never if it was a hot meal , maybe a roll or crusty bread if it was a salad .

Yes, family of 8 with not much money. I was born in the 60s, youngest child.
Irish mum, we grew up in SW London.
Sundays there wasn't bread with the roast, just extra Yorkshire puddings.

Same here, school lunch, piece of fruit after school then jam sandwich for tea.