Sliced Bread

Ever wonder where the first sliced bread got its name? When I read those words I thought of the time I lived through when there was no sliced bread. Any store-bought bread before the late 1920’s was unsliced, and it was a luxury in those days. When I first started to school there were no lunchrooms, as there are today. Everyone who could not go home at the noon hour carried lunch in a paper bag. Mostly it was a biscuit with ham or sausage and a cinnamon roll. Any baked bread bought at the grocery store was not sliced, but when a family could afford it, it was a real luxury.

The first loaves of bread on the market were named “Wonder Bread”, and they were not sliced at first. This is how “Wonder Bread” got its name. Created in 1921 by the Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, the new bread was almost ready for market when the question of a name arose. The vice president, Elmer Cline, happened to attend a balloon race one day. The sight of dozens of brightly-colored hot air balloons in the sky filled him with, as he later said, “wonder.” “Wonder Bread” was born without further ado. Cline was so impressed by the sight of those balloons that he covered his new product’s wrapper with red, yellow and blue balloons, which is still the package design today.

It was in 1933 that the Taggart Company introduced the very fi rst pre-sliced loaf of “Wonder Bread” to America’s consumers, the popularity of which is reflected in the phrase “the best thing since sliced bread”.

Thanks to the internet, here is another interesting fact. Did you think that Sara Lee baked all of those pies that are on the market? She never baked a pie, according to history. Sara Lee was the daughter of Charles Lubin, owner of a chain of bakeries in Chicago in the 1930’s, and he would let her taste-test his recipes. He eventually renamed his kitchen, The Kitchen of Sara Lee, because of a catch slogan penned by a man named Mitch Lee in 1968. The slogan was, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Sara Lee never played a role in the company, except for perhaps a few commercials.

Another name, “Twinkies” is happenstance. The manager of the Hostess bakery in Illinois developed these little golden tube cakes during the Depression, at a time when inexpensive treats were hard to come by. The manager, a man named Dewar, was on his way to show his bosses his new creation when he spotted a billboard for “Twinkle Toe Shoes”, and just like that, “Twinkies” were born.