Bread and cheese

Spring has been with us today an everywhere there are buds bursting into leaf; the colour new leaves is a green like no other and it’s almost impossible to capture it on film, it almost glows. Someone told me when I was little, I think it was my mum, but maybe it was my dad, when they themselves were children they used to take  beech leaves just new and soft and fresh, and eat them, and they called them ‘bread and cheese’. I’ve never tried them, so I can’t say whether they really are nice, but I don’t think they actually would taste of bread and cheese!

I looked this up and found that lots of new spring leaves were eaten by children and called ‘bread and cheese’, hawthorn leaves for example. The author of the piece I found about it mentions that this was in Buckinghamshire, and it was also found historically in the Bristol area; young miners on a protest march ate them, but maybe that was from hunger. Sorrel and wood sorrel were other plants eaten by children, and pink sorrel too, although pink sorrel is not a native British plant but an ornamental one. Bentgrass in Scotland, and the seeds of mallow in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, were also called bread and cheese by children.

I am sure that the origin of the nick-name was from a time when people were hungry, and those fresh young leaves were sustenance for them in times of need; those hard times became forgotten but lingered on in the games and names of children.

http://www.plant-lore.com/plantofthemonth/bread-and-cheese/