Fairy Bread
Why is it okay to eat sprinkles on buttered bread and call that breakfast?
Most of you will be surprised to hear that sprinkles, little pipes or beads of sugar in different colours and flavours, are considered real food in some parts of the world and not ‘candy’. Like even most other candy though these begin life as real plants, grown in the ground under the sun and harvested to be processed into human or animal then human food. It’s only once we get our hands on it that foods take on elements of culture; transform into cuisine. You’ll soon see how the same species can in different parts of the world and at different times consider some edibles food, thus acceptable at breakfast, and some candy; definitely not.
The origin is a little unclear. Though eating bread and butter is nearly as old as western culture, additional toppings as today seem to likely be a matter of both popularity and preference. One source found that topping buttered bread with sugar or sugar coated aniseed has been done in the Netherlands at least since the Middle Ages, at least by wealthier people. Another found a modern origin, more like candy production, in the marriage of the idea to top buttered bread with candy and chocolate. It’s interesting to me that it took nearly twenty years for this marriage to be brought to market, considering chocolate, butter and bread had been present in the Netherlands at least several hundred years. There’s surely an economic, historical or cultural logic behind this. If I were making a rich candy of nearly any kind, the first flavour that would occur to my twenty-first century mind would be chocolate.
Where I’m from, we catch a lot of flack from the international community for eating dessert for breakfast. To be clear, I’m not defending this. And to be even more clear, I’m Canadian and while that seems similar to American it is and isn’t in many important ways. But we famously, like America, have the unusual tradition of emphasising the moral virtues of breakfast while consuming foods the rest of world reserves for dessert at that meal. It’s not even thinly veiled either: our most famous Canadian breakfast is likely pancakes, literally cake with caramelised sugar syrup to imbibe it.
It’s unusual then that most of the articles I’ve read about fairy bread or hagelslag (the Dutch term for “hailstones” or topping buttered bread with sprinkles) have framed as a sort of culinary joie-de-vivré. A lesson we less cultured new-world humans can learn from our older, European sibling in the art of living.
Never mind that the practice isn’t actually that old world or that modern western breakfasts are decidedly less nutritious in both the new world and the old than they might have been a century ago or even that the analogy breaks down when you compare the Dutch hagelslag (about 1/3 chocolate) to the Australian hundreds and thousands (nearly all sugar) and that fairy bread is not a breakfast food and pancakes are one.
The cultural element that these practices point out is pointing in the mirror. The fact that we find some eating habits mundane and others interesting is what’s interesting, not the eating of sprinkles at a certain time of day.
Recent studies have refuted the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It likely isn’t. So long as skipping breakfast works for you, you’re able to eat well the rest of the day for example and not over-indulge later because of skipping a meal or some other compensatory behaviour, you’ll be fine. Why then did we think breakfast is so culturally important that we want it to be just as palatable as dessert just so we can have that meal? What is so virtuous about breakfast that we’ll defend it’s cultural importance, insisting that it’s not nutritionally or morally right to have chocolate sprinkles on toast. Chocolate could potentially be had at breakfast in hot water or milks, or in hazelnut spread or in cereal but certainly not sprinkled on bread. I’m arguing that it’s this indignation which tells us something about humanity.
It’s from my wife’s family that I learned about sprinkles on buttered toast. We even have some in the pantry though never in the same place for more than a week or so since we also have a toddler.
Maybe more familiar than hagelslag is the Australian tradition of fairy bread. Most cultures have birthday-specific foods, Australia is no different. There are certain simple, crowd pleasing recipes that are easy to whip up, transport and serve which you can bring with you to the many children’s birthdays we all attend whether or not we have children. A beloved classic of this genre is white sandwich bread, spread with butter or margarine and topped with rainbow sprinkles/nonpareils (called hundreds and thousands) which we call fairy bread. At least, in defence of fairy bread, we don’t consider it a breakfast food.
But beyond that I think there’s many similarities between fairy bread and another famously disliked Australian classic, Vegemite toast. And not just because they’re both bread based. I’d go so far as to say there’s a link between fairy bread and the famous fermented shark of Iceland. Both are acquired tastes, in a sense. The later is admittedly a more adult flavour profile (you’d likely agree even without having tried it). It would however be difficult to convince an uninitiated adult to eat something as silly and sickly sweet as fairy bread.
As a culinary aside to butter and sugar on bread, which I promise will tie into the larger theme, the only difference nutritionally between, say a donut, danish or croissant and fairy bread is connotation. Like the difference between batch brew and espresso, cartoons and art galleries, I’d argue the medium is the same and the striking difference is cultural. Sprinkles or even sugar on bread is perhaps more obvious, less nuanced than the architectural marvel of pastry that is a croissant but really, they’re the same. I could understand a distinction between fairy bread and an artisanal pastry made with local, biodynamic, organic ingredients grown, made and eaten with care and attention but most of us just are not eating that way. So to my mind a grocery store croissant and a grocery store fairy bread are on par, with the fairy bread possibly even scoring higher culinarily since you’re assembling it yourself.
The second and most important similarity of fairy bread to fermented shark is in the cultural context. Humans love to define their tribe as the people who recognise this food and eating it is nearly patriotic.
We humans like to define ourselves into groups. For most of human evolution this has been essential, a certain double-edged xenophobic curiosity was likely necessary to divide the world into those you could trust (your family, tribe) and those you could not. Apparently our ancestors recongized the need to overcome this prejudice in order to keep the tribe’s gene pool varied and healthy but not without considerable difficulty and (likely) intoxicants.
Vegemite is another example of a food with very specific cultural contexts. Thinly spreading Vegemite on buttered toast is an act of patriotism comparable to sculling a pint at the pub with your mates or singing Waltzing Matilda. Eating it on its own, or combined with another bread spread like peanut butter though will get you funny looks at best and frowns of disgust at worst. We are the people who eat this food in its particular way and definitely not that way.
Food cultures tend to have condiments which eaten on their own or in specific contexts like Vegemite, fermented shark or fairy bread serve the purpose of making that food not only richer, more complexly flavoured but also more of that cuisine.
There are more similarities between cuisines than differences. It is just that the differences stand out more. Think for example of the difference between a large onion cooked with a teaspoon of butter and thyme vs a teaspoon of soy sauce. One is unmistakably European, possibly specifically French; the other undeniably Asian though both are mostly onion.
Besides the cultural use to differentiate it is striking how similar these foods can be even within this differentiator category. Soy and fish sauce, Parmesan, Demi-glace and even ketchup are all strongly rich, umami often fermented flavours.
Ketchup, by the way, is so underrated in the culinary sense. Not because it’s necessarily delicious on its own (though I wouldn’t consider that a prerequisite for culinary greatness) but because it is so essentially umami rich. You probably don’t but it on buttered toast, but maybe you should?
And it serves the same purpose as these other culture-defining flavours. Savoury first but salty, sweet and sour. Add the bitter char on grilled foods and fatty richness these often contain within and what we consider a culinary pleb, the comic sans of the pantry or worse a crime against good taste, the actual comic sans, really is something we take for granted.
So fairy bread or hagelslag says more about humanity than it does about the Australians or the Dutch. It reminds us that we can learn to love anything just as we could learn to love each other. It also reminds us of an instinct to separate rather than integrate. It reminds us to think for ourselves and eat, if not live, with an open mind.