70s - early 80s childhood. Middle class, I suppose, not south-east, or northern-England. I'm really enjoying this thread, reading about different people's childhood food experiences, except for the "mop up" expression. I dislike it in the same way as "washed down with". Has anyone said "sop up" yet?
After a certain age, we never had bread with an evening meal. Unless it was scrambled eggs/beans on toast, or tinned tomato soup on a Sunday evening, if we'd had our main meal of the day at lunchtime.
On a weekday evening we'd have plenty of bread if it was with homemade soup (chicken, lamb or vegetable) for dinner in winter, and there would be cheese as well.
We always had fish on Friday evenings, but never, ever chips 😥 and no bread-and-butter! We had sautéed potatoes (so a bit like chips) or mashed potatoes and parsley sauce.
Mum was a fan of Elizabeth David and knew how to make vinaigrette and other salad dressings. If we had a special lunch or dinner with extended family, it would be three or four courses and we usually ate bread with the first course. It was fine to "mop up" your vinaigrette with bread, like a French person, but absolutely not your main course sauce (or gravy).
If we were having a "1970s classic" first course for a special/celebration dinner, like avocado, smoked salmon, or prawns in cocktail dressing, the bread would be a small (but heavy/dense) wholemeal loaf from the local bakery, sliced "wafer" thin (fairly thin) and buttered.
Casseroles, yum... a lot of "continental" types: Coq au Vin, Boeuf Bourginion, Paprika Chicken, Beef Goulash - about as 1970s as it gets. Mostly we had rice with them, occasionally baked potatoes, but never bread.
When we had a Sunday roast lunch or dinner, there wasn't a gallon of gravy available. No bread, unless it was in bread sauce or stuffing. There was just about enough gravy (made from the meat or chicken juices) for everyone to pour some over the meat on their plate and dip their vegetables and roast potatoes into.
If you'd been a guest on Sunday at our house back then, and poured yourself so much gravy that your lunch/dinner plate was a lake that needed "mopping up", everyone else at the table would continue to talk to you politely while wanting to murder you as they ate their gravy-less meal. If you'd asked my mum for bread to "mop up" a large pool of gravy at the end of that roast lunch, sorry to say she'd have given you a quizzical (pass-agg) "I don't know what you mean" smile, and carried your brimming plate to the kitchen herself, very carefully, as if it were filled with plutonium.
But now I'm thinking about having no bread with a Sunday roast, there's a reason we craved roast chicken over beef or lamb: the stuffing was so good. At least half of a large, unsliced white loaf, cut into cubes and left to dry for a few hours, masses of butter, big handfuls of dried thyme and parsley, not stuffed into the chicken but cooked separately in the oven in a casserole dish, lid off for the last bit of cooking, so it browned.
Garlic bread (taste sensation!) with pasta, double-carbs, was definitely a thing in the 1970s! I vividly remember my first lasagne, with garlic bread, at an Italian restaurant. I was around 9. It was sublime.
This thread has brought back many good food memories from childhood, so I apologise for rambling on.
Bread-wise, everything changed for me when I went to boarding school at the end of the seventies. Lunches were revolting. Our evening meal was "tea" at around 5pm. It was always something carb-heavy (and cheap to make) such as potato-and-cheese pie, and then huge piles of white sliced bread, dishes of butter and jam. At least it was real butter, not marg. After we'd done our prep, we'd have supper of more bread, butter and jam, and things from our tuck-boxes.
I believe nobody has ever eaten as much ready-sliced bread as a boarding school child of my generation. But at the time, most of us couldn't get enough of it, because we played compulsory sport for an hour every weekday at lunchtime, and again after lessons and before tea (when it was light enough, so most of the time at school), and for 3 or 4 hours every Saturday morning, sometimes all day on Saturday. We would have starved without bread and butter.
Food in the holidays at home was paradisical by comparison. But even now, especially if I have a cold, or am otherwise a bit poorly, I occasionally crave sliced white bread and butter as a comfort food. I wouldn't have it with my evening meal, I have it instead, with honey.