>>>>The bread my wife makes is pretty much a nirvana-in-a-loaf. And it does get toasted sometimes - when, say, older than two days. And we have a slicer machine so slicing to toaster width isn't a problem.
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>>>What's missing in this conversation is how important manufactured (yuck) bread was to women. When women starting moving into the workforce, it became more and more difficult to do cooking from scratch and work out of the home. There weren't any tv dinners back then and putting a meal together was a lot of labor. Bread is a staple. Unless the women wanted to be up all night baking bread for the next day, a loaf from the store or bakery was a godsend. It's amazing what someone will settle for in order to have more time for other responsibilities (except for those folks who could afford kitchen help or lived near a bakery). Pre-sliced bread saved the woman of the household from having to slice the bread in the morning and back then everyone had lots of kids. You couldn't have your kids slicing their own bread or you would end up with ragged pieces and mashed bread. Sliced bread was even banned for a time during WWII.
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>>>The preference for home-made bread though is pretty universal as demonstrated by the huge sales of bread machines.
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>>The bread I'm describing used to come from an industrial bakery, and was still as good as domestic, except when they were experimenting with "enriched" and such. But it was more or less the good bread we grew up with. Yeah, something to cut the bread would be a help, but every household had one good long knife, and since the bread was good without any need to toast it, making breakfast was a snap - just as much work as with the toaster, and actually faster (remember, anything can be spread on it without any prerequisite operation).
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>>So, it's not the industrial vs domestic. It's the recipe. And the recipe that the bread industry here uses is... {remains textless}.
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>One thing I noticed while living in Europe: It was common to eat bread untoasted for breakfast with jam, honey, cheese, or meat (had a hard time getting used to that - it was 'lunch' to me); but here in the states, as far back as I can remember, it was always toasted for breakfast whether it be in the oven or in a toaster.


Not in England. Here it's always toast. But then we're not really part of Europe :-)