A review for William Rubel’s Bread says: "In discussing bread one can find oneself talking about some of the largest issues of history and society." I hope so.

When I messaged William to talk about our personal and dialectical connection to the bread roll, he insisted, rightly, that first we nailed down what we were discussing.

“Fussy definitions make for copy but not enlightenment,” he said. “Do you have a mental image? What makes a bread roll? What is a bread roll—in concept and make-up?”

“Surely that is where we must start.”

It’s a first date question. It’s something to debate over pints and a cheese and coleslaw bap. It’s an argument in the kebab shop at 1 a.m. It’s a reason to fall out with a favourite baker when they revise their packaging. It’s a clichéd social media meme and an easy engagement win. People queue up to die on the already heavily-bodied hill that is the true and rightful name of their favoured handheld breadstuff. We love to claim the naming rights of our daily bread. It’s personal. It’s tribal.

In Minsheu’s dictionary, published in 1617, we see what is probably our first English language reference to a “cob.”

“Cobloaf or bunne... It is a little loafe made with a round head, such as Cobiorns which support the fire.” (Minsheu, 1617 #146)

William Rubel points out that this shows—right from the start—that defining the bread roll might be a losing battle.

“The cob itself, as a roll, has its own specific history,” he says.“It is an illustration of the issue you are writing about—different names for similar things separated by distance or by time. Wherever you draw a line someone is bound to find a reason that you have drawn it in the wrong place.”

But to me, this is not a deterrent. In fact, it shows that there is much to talk about within these smaller definitions, and more to discover socially, historically and geographically than perhaps first thought.

So, returning to a time before cobs, what defined the word “bread” to a nation of risen-dough-eaters?

***

Jonnie Robinson, a curator at the British Library who specialises in accents and dialects, was not surprised to hear about the topic of this project. In fact, people call him to try to get to the bottom of the issue all the time.

“Bread was historically a generic term for any baked item,” he says, getting patiently to the point. “‘Cake’ and ‘loaf’ originally referred to the shape of that ‘bread’, with ‘cake’ usually being of a smaller size, and ‘loaf’ usually meaning ‘large bread.’”

“This explains why some of our words for ‘bread roll’ include the word ‘cake.’”

There’s a reason the Lancashire barmcake, the Yorkshire breadcake, the teacake from somewhere in the middle are named the way they are. And it’s nothing to do with the amount of sugar (or honey, or spices, or currants) added into the dough. But does this mean we’ve stumbled upon an ending already? Is “cake” the linguistically correct suffix for the bread roll? Well, not exactly.

“You could write a whole section on the terms ‘bap’ and ‘batch’ too,” Jonnie says, which feels a little deflating after his earlier “cake” revelation.

“And ‘cob…’ That’s named after the shape as well as the size. Most bakers believe it to come from an earlier word meaning ‘lump of stuff’—like in the word ‘cobblestone.’ I’d look in the Oxford English Dictionary to verify that if I were you.”

So I did.

In the OED, the etymology of the word “cob” and what it has come to mean over the years is a pleasingly scattered origination that seems to have been forcibly kneaded together. The entry reads:

“Used in a number of senses having but little apparent connection with each other, and possibly of diverse origin. The notions may be roughly distinguished of ‘something big or stout’, ‘something rounded or forming a roundish lump’, ‘a head or top’; but these are intricately interwoven in individual senses.”

The first definition is of a “great” or “big” man, used in this context in a work from around 1420. Additionally, there is a note that the word cob contains the notion of “big or stout.” Later “cobyllstone” is mentioned, and digging around a little bit proves that this word—now spelled “cobblestone” of course—has been used to mean both a round stone for laying paths and walls, and for the stones in fruit, since at least the 1400s (and even then it was known to be a word taken from old Anglo-Saxon). It makes sense that eventually, this double-strength word would become a catch-all term for describing a “lump of stuff.”

Further along the dictionary entry, In 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette is rather excitingly spotted referring to a cob as something edible. This is perhaps the first use of cob to define a type of bread roll noted in written and published English.

But what does this have to do with my sandwich? Well, it points to the British Library’s definition fairly accurately. It seems that “cob” defines a size and shape, rather than an object. So in that sense, it’s probably got just as much right to the bread roll name as “cake.”

As we already know, however, there are many more ways to name a bap. The British bread roll is an important staple food in all its guises, but why does it have so many aliases? And why does such a simple foodstuff incite such powerful debate?

***

“There is an accepted ambiguity in the way we use the term ‘bread’ that lets us both recognise [it] as a hugely wide classification of foodstuffs, and to think of bread for our own table as a more narrowly defined concept,” says William Rubel in his book Bread: A Global History.

He continues: “One way to read this definition is an admission by the lexicographer that bread is so much a cultural object that it means too many things to too many people to be pinned down… [it] is really saying that bread without adjectives is more the purview of the anthropologist than the lexicographer: cultural usage determines meaning, so to find the precise meaning of bread, consult the culture you want to use as the reference point.”

To clarify, then—as William correctly demands of us—in this feature we are talking about handheld bread products baked and eaten in England, Wales, Scotland, and the island of Ireland. Within this, I am looking at how this everyday product is entwined in dialect and local culture in these areas. This is my reference point. It feels odd to discuss a foodstuff in total isolation of the many thousands of cultures that have brought so much to these strange, wet countries. I would love to talk about how bread in Great Britain and Ireland has changed to incorporate our ever-shifting population, and perhaps how our bread has visited the world with us as we ruthlessly colonised it—but that’s for another time, perhaps.

Our friend the OED chooses to centre the definition of bread as a kneaded preparation of baked meal or flour. Bread rolls, buns, barms, stotties, teacakes and cobs are harder to pin down definitively, so I started calling bakers.

I asked one based in the North East—who wished to remain anonymous—for their chosen name for a “handheld bread usually filled with other foodstuffs, unenriched”, and I was told in no uncertain terms that they were deeply unhappy with every single aspect of my question. For one thing, they said, to enrich bread is necessary no matter the form. I tried to clarify that my term of “enrichment” had been used only to erase fruitcakes, milk breads and lardy buns from my purist survey, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Bread is an emotional subject and I had put my foot in it. Changing the wording of my questionnaire slightly I continued my investigation, after which things started to go a little more smoothly.

Anna Herbert is a fifth generation baker, whose family have owned and run Hobbs House Bakery in the market town of Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire in the South West of England since the 1920s. When I called, she held the phone out and asked the whole room of bakers to shout out their thoughts. The resounding answer: a bap.

“We call it a bap,” she explained, “but because of the growth of the burger industry we changed the name of our burger baps to a burger bun. It’s just what people ask for. So here we have baps, buns and rolls.”

An hour or so up the M5 to Worcester in the West Midlands, Peter Cook of Peter Cook’s Bread agrees—to some extent.

“It could be a bap, that’s quite a common word in this area. We’re a bit different though—there’s no Herefordshire or Worcestershire specialist bread cake. Where I used to work there was a speciality called a ‘white cake.’ It was a soft bread roll, floured on top, I’d never got to the bottom of any difference other than that.”

Warings Bakery in Reading, about an hour and a half’s drive west from Central London, has a different opinion. Daniel Carr, head of PR, isn’t having any of this bap-based nonsense. Warings has been owned and run by the same family for four generations, and since 1932, they’ve used the word “roll.”

“Our customers ask for a roll—most often it’s a crusty roll: a small round roll, crusty and darker in appearance. More fired,” Daniel tells me. “A bap to us is slightly larger, soft and flatter, generally used for a burger and it doesn’t have a crust so the flavour is different. Baps are paler, more golden, and they’ve got an enriched dough with milk and fat to make it softer.”

But… those both sound like handheld types of bread, don’t they?

“I always called it a roll,” he says.

Clare Barton at Bakehouse 124 in Tonbridge, Kent, in the South East, agrees, but she’s more amenable to the regional names too.

“A roll! It’s always a roll,” she says. “For some reason though, at school everyone called it a bap. I never felt strongly about it—a roll has a different personality everywhere you live.”

““We love to claim the naming rights of our daily bread. It’s personal. It’s tribal.””

Clare trained at the School of Artisan Foods in Nottingham, and this has given her an open mind when it comes to bread.

“Other people on my bakery course felt very strongly that it wasn’t a roll, it was a bap. I was like, it’s a word. It’s a round piece of bread with a crust all around, that you can eat. I’m really interested that different regions take pride in something that differs to each county and how they use it,” she says.

“We’ve started making something called the Kent huffkin—a smaller version of a stottie. Traditionally it’s a small, flat, soft bap-roll enriched with lard to preserve it, with a really light base and not crusty. It has a dimple in the top and historically that was for putting a local Kentish cherry in.”

But we digress—the research here is strictly for the fruit-free breadcake. Barmcake. Teacake. As charming as a huffkin sounds, like a delicious little Moomin snack, it doesn’t count here. Strike it from the list.

Something that came up time and again when speaking to bakers from the South of England was the idea that bread rolls had weirder names in the North. Chris Latham, of Lathams, a bakery based in the Lancashire towns of Preston and Southport, was happy to assist. Lathams has been baking bread in the north-west of the country for 53 years. It’s a household name to me.

“I’ve normally always called it a barm cake,” he says, separating the words matter-of-factly, “Which I’m sure is a West or North Lancashire term.”

“That name is based on the days before commercial yeast. Bakers had what was called a barm; a bucket of flour and water that became their fermented yeast. This is what they’d bake a barm cake with, and which is essentially what people are now using to make their sourdough.”

In Yorkshire, the bread cake and the tea cake reign supreme—using the word “cake” in its historically accurate form. Another charming word used, however, is the “scuffler.” A triangular-shaped oven bottom roll (although you know how it is by now, they may not have to be), they’re soft and heavily floured on top, leaving you with a white moustache after a hefty bite.

Alan Potter, who bakes at J & J Graham in Penrith in Cumbria, also has strong opinions on the subject. (Who doesn’t?)

“Where I’m from in the North East, it’s a stottie roll,” he says.

“My brother used to work in Newcastle for Marks & Spencer’s and was asked to take a delicacy from his region to a food department meeting in London. He took a stottie, and they said, ‘this is great, we could improve on this’ and he told them, ‘no way! It’s already perfect the way it is!’”

Stotties, the North East’s massive cousin to the sandwich roll, was the bread that fueled generations of labour-driven industry. It’s a whole meal. Filled with ham and pease pudding, a sort-of thick dhal-like paste-soup made with yellow split peas boiled and flavoured with ham stock, onion and herbs and spices like pepper, bay leaf, thyme, and celery salt, Alan reckons it can rarely be beaten.

But just because it’s a famous type of bread roll, doesn’t make it definitive. Stotties are so regionally defended, so specific in their make-up and so culturally intertwined with the area they were first baked within that it might even be insulting to glaze every roll with the noble name of the stottie. Stotties are not named. They are born.

“I’ve not tried to replicate it here because it’s so regional to a very specific area,” Alan says in agreement. “Here in Penrith, I make bread rolls.”

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, Kirk’s Home Bakery has been baking bread for 24 years. Caitlin Kirk tells me that despite baking different styles of rolls at the bakery, customers usually ask for the same thing.

“They actually ask for a bap but it depends—we have a soft bap or scotch rolls, crusty rolls are known as Belfast baps, crusty like a tiger loaf.”

“To me, bread rolls are a bap.”

In Ireland a roll or a bap is commonplace. But if you miss out a Waterford Blaa you’d be doing Ireland and yourself a disservice, as they’re a delicious addition to the bread roll family. Made crusty or soft and historically made in Wexford in the south-east of the country, they’ve had Protected Geographical Indication status since 2013 (an EU ruling that “emphasises the relationship between the specific geographic region and the name of the product.”) Try one with red lead in it—a type of pinky-red luncheon meat named after an essential ingredient in the manufacture of Waterford Crystal.

Now, Scotch rolls are something I care deeply about. I spent a butter-thick chunk of my childhood growing up in Aberdeenshire and a scotch, Glasgow or “morning roll” to me, is a beautiful thing. Distinct from a softie, this chewy, wide-aired, crisply-crusted angel of a bread roll is higher in salt and well-fired for a dark, flavoursome bite people strive for in fashionable sourdough.

Softies are their uncool but extremely useful cousin. A soft-baked, close-crumb thing I could be moved after 13 years in Lancashire to call a “bap,” these slightly sweeter rolls are useful as ham and pickle receptacles. Let’s eat and then ignore the beautiful rowie for now—otherwise known as an Aberdeen buttery—it’s a flaky, lard-filled, solidly compressed croissant of a bread product made primarily for eating at sea. I like them toasted with jam on, or raw. But they aren’t a bread roll.

Bara Planc, a traditional Welsh hearth or bakestone bread, is an interesting one—I’m happy to include it because of its modest, bready ingredients. However, it is not baked in an oven but on a griddle. This might seem reckless of me. However, the stottie would not be a stottie without the heat of the bottom of the oven cooking it from bottom to top. If you want to get into semantics, be my guest, but it’ll be a waste of time. I won’t be budged.

***

Indulge me for a minute: while I was researching this article I came across the fascinating Taylor Ham-Pork Roll war, an ongoing local feud that was being bitterly fought in delis and kitchens all over New Jersey in the US. To the north of the state, Taylor Ham seems to be the accepted name. From Princeton down past Atlantic City, almost everyone calls it Pork Roll. It’s just ham. Why does it matter?

Tom Grieb, CEO of the Case Pork Roll factory in Trenton, New Jersey, spoke to Sporkful on NPR about the war (and I absolutely implore you to listen to the episode, it is fantastic.)

“Don’t they have anything better to do? I don’t like any conflict!” he said, confused and a little amused. “If they say I make Taylor Ham I will correct them though. Other than that, as long as you eat it, I’m good.”

After all the chatting with bakers and now this ham-based detour, I’ve come to a separate-but-related conclusion: people are more likely to fight over things that are scarce. Customers are concerned with identity, and in the Taylor Ham/Pork Roll case, things that make New Jersey unique are in short supply. Therefore their ham matters to them. This links directly—I think—to industry towns in the UK growing rapidly or connecting in unexpected ways, and losing other parts of their identity during various shifting moments in history. What remains as a local identifier is worth fighting over to the local population.

***

I feel it’s important to introduce you to some of my personal biases. I am a Lancastrian, born in Lancaster, where there is no real discernible dialect other than “Northern.” I spent my teenage years in Aberdeenshire where I developed a brilliant tcheuchter accent which has sadly all but vanished.

I’ve lived in Lancashire, North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Humberside, Greater London and Greater Manchester. That’s a lot of different words for bread roll.

It’s an ongoing argument people love to start. Put a photo of your bacon butty on the internet and count down from five… someone will declare it a barm, a cob, a breadcake, or something else entirely, and then position themselves defensively in front of it. I’m fully aware in writing this essay—despite my best efforts—I will likely omit a much-beloved local and historic name, offending several people. It’s contentious, and it’s complex. There is so much more to bread rolls than flour, yeast, salt, water and fat.

““Stotties are not named. They are born.””

Laurel Mackenzie is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics at NYU. She led a research group at Manchester University titled “Our Dialects” in which she tracked the names of bread rolls throughout the UK (among other varying items.) She has made a specific map of bread roll names based on this research.

“Naming our bread is part of our local identity,” she tells me. “It’s just the same as accents.”

Normally interested in how sounds change in dialects geographically, Laurel’s specialisms in sociolinguistics and dialectology drove her bread roll map.

“What we found pretty early on is that England is split into three parcels generally when it comes to bread rolls,” she explains. “The vast majority of people in the South call them rolls. The majority of the people living in the Midlands called them a cob in our research. In the North, a slight majority of people called them barms over baps.”

Zoom into the map and you’ll reveal microclimates of muffins, batches, tea cakes, bin lids and buns. North of the border in Scotland, evidence is scattered, with the majority of respondents choosing “roll.” In Northern Ireland, the most popular name seems to be “bap.” On the Isle of Man, “bun” purists can’t stave off the popularity of “bap.” In Wales, “roll” appears to be the champion English term, although “bap” and “bun” are definitely used frequently too.

“Tea cake is almost exclusive to the North West, particularly areas north of Manchester, like Leeds and Blackburn. Barm is another variant used almost exclusively in the North West, in a widespread region covering the likes of Manchester, Wigan, Preston, Liverpool and Blackpool.”
—Laurel Mackenzie, Bread — Our Dialects

I ask Laurel, because I’m Northern and it’s always intrigued me, why does the North of England especially seem to have so many different words for bread rolls?

“Dialects are really neat indicators of the movement of people, and identity is a big part of why people keep hold of these words,” she explains. “It’s a way of saying ‘here’s who I am and where I come from.’”

This makes a lot of sense to me—Northerners have historically moved about a hell of a lot, for many reasons but most recently, to follow work from the fields to the cities and mill towns. In this sense, I’m starting to see a pattern where places of displacement or movement of people have encouraged building more firm local identifiers in their dialect.

After all her research, however, there’s something about the naming of bread rolls that Laurel can’t get to the bottom of.

“What puzzles me,” she says, “Is why bread? Why not beer?”

***

Chris Young from the Campaign For Real Bread—like CAMRA for bakeries—agrees with Laurel that the names of bread rolls comes from a desire to linguistically signpost our personal heritage. He also thinks, by the way, that they are pretty much all the same.

“Call them baps, buns, barm cakes, stotties, cobs and whatnot, rolls often tend to be pretty similar wherever you are,” Chris tells me. “The different local names are historical artefacts of linguistic influences from wave after wave of invaders and visitors to our marvellously mongrel nation, which transport and lack of telecommunication in a pre-industrial age helped to keep regionalised.”

“Many regional languages and dialects have died, but the arbitrary nature of language means that unless there’s a good reason for a word to change overnight, it probably won’t and habit will keep it lingering on,” he adds.

In Chris’ view, whatever they’re called, bread rolls are essentially the same—borne from a need to eat bread conveniently. I asked whether there were any real differences in commercially-made bread rolls that would perhaps require them to gain protected designations of origin.

“Typically a bun is a bun is a bun,” he says, inadvertently choosing the word “bun” to describe his version of a handheld bread product.

“They’re made from off-the-peg flour, a bit of fat, and in the case of the industrial loaf fabricators, there’s probably a dash of one or more artificial additives in there as well. Some small, local, independent Real Bread bakeries are, however, reviving the use of flour milled locally from locally-grown heritage wheat that you won’t find anywhere else, so perhaps we’ll again start to see rolls themselves that are actually as different as their names.”

***

In a later conversation, William Rubel hands me a warning.

“Without recipe data and images I am not sure, conceptually, how you determine what names do and don’t refer to which rolls.”

This was a secret worry of mine too. Deep down in the folds of my brain, I felt the niggling shadowy doubt that no matter how many bakers I spoke to, I’d never manage to create a meaningful conclusion. It’s not unusual for me to take solace in history, and so I picked up a copy of Traditional Foods of Great Britain by Laura Mason to soothe me.

““Naming our bread is part of our local identity. It’s just the same as accents.””

— Professor Laurel Mackenzie

Her book calmed me by giving me fundamental reasons to rule out certain names for my specific line of research. The Hawkshead Wig didn’t make it, being enriched as it is by caraway. The Cornish saffron bun, as delicious as it is, has, I’m sorry, at least milk and local saffron in it. The Kent Huffkin, luffkin or uffkin also had to be discounted because of its milk and sugar. This might make some people angry, I’m told—not all huffkins are milky. I’m afraid I have to draw a line somewhere though.

I was also interested to find the word “bap” referred to as being from or at least related to Scotland in Laura Mason’s book, in which she includes the following definition:

Bap: McNeill (1929) The Scot’s Kitchen suggests analogy with pap, Scots for boob. First identified in the 16th C. Generic description, so size and shape varies. Split in half and filled.

What came first, the bap or the boob? Maybe that’s a deep-dive for another time.

***

In the five volume cookbook Modernist Bread, there are 1,200 recipes for bread, traditional and commercial, from all over the planet. It was written by Chef Francisco Migoya, and Nathan Myrhvold, a food technology fanatic who set up his Modernist Cuisine project to dissect and discover the scientific facts behind the mysteries of food. You may have seen him on your favourite Netflix food travel programmes.

In a feature on the book for Taste magazine (which is, unfortunately, as close as I managed to get to the book, being that my local libraries do not have a copy and it costs around £350 to buy), baker Jim Lahey comes to the following conclusion:

“There are two forms of bread: tubes and balls. And that’s all there is.”

Maybe—just maybe—we’ve been overthinking it.

After all this time and research, I am more sure than ever that I don’t think there is a definitively correct name for a lump of handheld bread. We all know what our own bread rolls are called and reject other options, because we instinctively know we are right. This is knowledge we grew up knowing. You’re not wrong, but neither is anyone else.

Thanks to Jonnie Robinson at the British Library, William Rubel, and Laurel Mackenzie, we know that the names of our bread speaks to our complex relationship with our heritage and, potentially, our deeper connection to our existence. The names we give things that matter to us, namely our bread, speaks to our upbringing and the social history of our families and the towns we live in. Bread has been the staple diet of our ancestors for thousands of years. Bread rolls have fed the branches of our family trees for generations. Bread matters to us.

And the types of bread we eat are inherently important to our social history too. Their parochial names (and the fierce defending of them) show the changes and movements society in Britain and Ireland has undergone. It is perhaps one of the last remaining marks showing the heritage of the working classes who built our countries.

The words we use make the world lucid, and denote our place within it. I don’t think we’ve been overthinking it. Words matter. Keep fighting your bread wars.