Live, Laugh, Loaf: Newfoundland Bread Lore
There’s nothing quite like fresh, homemade bread — it smells like warmth, feels like comfort and tastes like home.
I don’t know if I find any other food quite as satisfying. I was lucky enough to I grow up in a house with plenty of fresh bread — thanks to the work of my mother and my grandmother.
I have many memories of eating fresh, hot-out-of-the-oven bread. It was delicious with just butter but sometimes a layer of molasses or, when the bread had cooled, some partridgeberry jam and thick cream made it an extra-special treat.
Besides being delicious, for generations of Newfoundlanders bread was a nutritional staple. It was a good source of calories that could be made at home from shelf-stable ingredients. In isolated outports, it was one of the few ways to keep a family from going hungry.
Newfoundlanders relied on bread made at home for a long time. Commercial baking was late coming to the island and, for many, commercial bread was viewed as a different substance than home made bread. According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English store bought bread was sometimes referred to as ‘baker’s fog’ which, to me anyway, doesn’t sound like an endorsement. On the other hand, I was recently heard about a tradition of serving sandwiches made using commercial bread at birthday parties because that was a treat.
Homemade bread took on a role outside of nutrition, too. There’s lots of folklore connected to bread. Some of it is concerned with day-to-day living while some of it is decidedly supernatural.
I’m gonna start with the latter.
Good Friday Bread
Traditionally, much of Newfoundland’s predominantly Christian population kept Good Friday as a day of rest. People stopped work except, maybe, where baking was concerned. Bread was often remained on the to-do list. In fact, in some communities (including Happy Adventure and Salvage) it was thought bread should be made on Good Friday.
Good Friday bread was baked a little differently, though — with the kitchen door wide open. It was said that the smell of baking bread wafting out into the world would refresh Jesus on his way to the cross. Perhaps because of this ‘scent offering’ it was thought Good Friday bread had supernatural powers.
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Similar to Good Friday Bread there are traditions concerning pork cooked on Shrove Tuesday ( or during Lent). One of these is detailed by Dominique Lalande in “A time of restraint: a survey of the Good Friday traditions in Newfoundland,” published in Culture & Tradition (1986).
According to the author, in Conception Harbour pork cooked on Shrove Tuesday, was put on a stick and placed in the beam of the kitchen where it stayed for the rest for the year as a charm. While it remained, the family would be safe from hunger.
According to tradition, a loaf of Good Friday bread would never spoil or go mouldy. It could also bestow luck on a home. Pieces of Good Friday bread kept about the house would supposedly keep it safe from fire.
Doubling down on religion — Good Friday or not, there’s a superstition that bread put away to proof won’t rise unless the dough had been marked with a cross.
Bed Bread
You can’t blame people for grasping at any straw. Baking bread was hard work and fraught with difficulty, especially in the winter.
Yeast has to be warm to work and houses were often cold, especially at night. On the coldest nights it was not unusual to take yeast to bed so that the body heat under the blankets would keep it alive. Sometimes even freshly baked bread was held in the foot of the bed to keep it from freezing.
Bread Poultices
When Newfoundlanders weren’t sleeping with their bread, they sometimes wore it — as a bread poultice.
A bread poultice is a soft, moist mass of bread. It was used to treat skin ailments, infections and splinters. Depending on who was prescribing, the bread was mixed with other ingredients including molasses, cream, eggs, soap or sugar.
They weren’t difficult to make. A simple bread/salt poultice could be made by putting two slices of home-made bread in a cloth bag along with some salt. The bag was boiled for half an hour. While it was still hot, the poultice was put on the injury and left overnight. If it worked as hoped, by morning it would have removed any dirt or splinter from injury.
A poultice made with Good Friday bread was thought to be especially potent.
There may have been some medical value to bread poultices but, in practice, they too often became a breeding ground for bacteria. They eventually declined in popularity.
Bread had other medicinal uses too. It was thought to cure warts — if it was buttered and rubbed on the wart.
I’m pretty sure that didn’t work.
In any case, if you were sick with something worse than a wart and no remedy was going to help, bread might break the bad news.
Foretelling Death
While it varied from house-to-house, the style of homemade bread in Newfoundland is, generally, fairly soft with an even, spongy texture, filled with lots of tiny air pockets.
Occasionally those pockets can get pretty large and create an open space in the loaf. It’s not something a baker wants to see. It not something a superstitious person wants to see, either.
A large hole in a piece of bread was thought to foretell death. The hole symbolizes an open grave; a grave that would soon be filled with the body of a friend or loved-one.
All too often in Newfoundland, death came at sea and there was a belief that bread could help there too.
Finding Bodies
It was thought that bread could be used to find the body of a person lost at sea.
To find a body, a candle was placed in a loaf of bread. The bread was put into the ocean, near the site of the missing body. The loaf would immediately drift to the space above the body, allowing searchers to recover it.
I don’t know why, but of all the macabre things i’ve written about on this blog, I find the notion of ‘bread-candling for bodies’ to be one of the creepiest.
Stopping Fairies
Perhaps one of the best remembered pieces of Newfoundland bread folklore is the idea that it can keep fairies at bay.
Fairies, in Newfoundland mythology, are not the benevolent godmothers of Disney movies. They are… troublesome. Fairies lead people astray in the woods, exchange changelings for babies, and any encounter might leave someone fairy struck — permanently changed by the fairies.
It was best to avoid them.
One way to keep fares under control was to makes sure anyone venturing into the woods had a piece of bread. Bread could stop the fairies from Interfering with humans. Bread carried for this purpose was sometimes called, ‘company bread’ or ‘bread for the road.’
It’s not entirely clear why fairies were so bread-averse.
It’s been suggested that bread’s link to religion might be part of it but, if they were relying on homemade bread (not hard bread) I wonder if it might have been something else.
Earlier in this piece I described homemade bread as smelling like warmth, feeling like comfort and tasting like home. Bread came from the family kitchen and was intimately tied to it. If I were looking for a talisman to keep me connected to home, I can’t think of a better candidate than bread.
Regardless of origin, the superstition of bread and its ability to protect from fairies is a strong one. And not confined to the past. I’ve met young people in the 21st century who’ve told me they would not go into the woods without bread in their pocket.
Any Way You Slice It
From feeding families to fending off fairies, bread was an important part of life in Newfoundland.
I’m sure the beliefs I’ve mentioned above are just a fraction of those that are out there. If you know any bread folklore, cures or magic I’d love to hear about it!
The comments are always open.
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Tye, D. (2011). “Bread for the Road”:: Intersections of Food and Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador. Newfoundland Studies, 26(2), 175–196.
Lalande, D (1986). A time of restraint: a survey of the Good Friday traditions in Newfoundland. Culture & Tradition, vol. 10
Bread and Bread Manufacturing, Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador
Historic Newfoundland and Labrador, L. English, 1985
Folk Cures, Newfoundland Traditions, M. Lovelace, 1976
Complains Is Many and Various But The Odd Divil Likes It, R. Moyles, 1975
Fairy Struck, DNE Word Slip
Strange Terrain, Barbara Rieti, Memorial University Press
Old time magic for Halloween in Newfoundland