The Little-Known Yet Fascinating Origin Story Of Bread Bowls

Bread bowls seem like a modern thing since many of us remember when we first saw one in the '90s or 2000s, but like many of our favorite "new" foods, they can trace a linage back hundreds of years. The current form of the bread bowl in the United States was popularized in San Francisco, where the city's sourdough baking heritage combined with its love of chowder and a little bit of canny marketing. Outside the Bay Area, you might've first encountered one at Panera, which helped popularize the bread bowl with soup as a nationwide chain during the less carb-conscious days around the turn of the 21st century. But before their resurgence, bread bowls had been eaten in different forms going back to the medieval era, with the most notable example being in Ireland.

As the story goes, the first known commercial version of the bread bowl originated in Dublin, Ireland, in the 15th century. While entertaining an English duke, a local Irish nobleman created the bread bowl to impress him. The ploy worked, and the duke was so taken with the bread bowl that he actually gave the nobleman money to open up a bread bowl shop in Dublin in 1427. But while that was the earliest origin of a fancier version of the bread bowl, the history of eating off of bread actually goes back even further, and the evolution into the modern bread bowl was only the final step of a practical necessity.

That English duke may have loved what he saw as a novel meal, but bread had been used as a bowl long before that. Before the widespread availability of industrially produced tableware, stale bread was used as both a plate and bowl. Called trenchers, hard stale bread would be hollowed out and filled with stew, porridge, and other food for people to eat from. This wasn't something for a duke. Trenchers were made from dark brown bread, not the white bread of the rich, and would be as much as four days old to acquire the hardness needed to support the meal.

One big difference between trenchers and modern bread bowls however, is that they were not made to actually be eaten. They were hard enough to be considered unpalatable, even for the masses, and the leftover soggy bread was fed to dogs or given out to people on the street. This early use of bread bowls persisted into the 14th century, just before the time our duke was fed his bread bowl. After that the common people began using wooden plates, although they were still called trenchers after the original bread bowl. It took until white bread, and sourdough, became more widely available to the masses for the rest of us to eat like old English dukes, but the idea for bread bowls has always been out there, waiting to be filled with a hearty stew.