January 18th - Olde Bread
Olde Bread
Although in Olde English they used the word "bread," (though they spelled it a little different), the more commonly used word for the same was "loaf." Combining the word loaf for their word for guardian, they came up with this word "lavard" which means "loaf guardian" and was used to describe the father of a household. After the Norman invasion, when words began to see their evolution into Middle English, the word became shortened to "lord." Likewise, the word "lady" is cognate with "loaf" and "dough," and literally translates to "loaf dough maker." So, in a single house, there was a bread maker and a bread guardian, a lord and a lady, later to take on a more prominent class status. That's pretty much how we ended up with that term "bread winner."
Anyway, those Olde English types were crazy about their bread because it was a seasonless staple. It was the only seasonless staple. In an early, early Olde English poem, one of the very first written down, we see this "loaf guardian" applied by an Irish monk to Jesus, and the analogy and eventual metaphor continues from there. Likewise, in the Latin influenced European countries, they were doing a similar thing. In Latin, "com" means "with" and "panion" means bread. Therefore, a companion is one that you break bread with.
Thought that was neat and a good reminder to bake some bread.