Ploughman's lunch a character comment that "A rural labourer who sits on the ditch-side with his bread and cheese and an onion has more enjoyment out of it than any Lucullus". The "Oxford English Dictionary" notes the first recorded use of the phrase "ploughman's lunch" as 1837, from the book "Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott" by John G. Lockhart, but this stray early use may have meant merely the sum of its parts, "a lunch for a ploughman". While farm labourers usually carried their food with them to eat in the fields, similar food was for a long time
Bread sauce or chicken. The use of slightly stale bread is optimal, making it an economical way of using up leftover bread. The sauce is easy to make and uses readily available ingredients. Bread sauce can be traced back to at least as early as medieval times, when cooks used bread as a thickening agent for sauces. The utilisation of bread in this way probably comes from cooks wanting to use up their stale bread who discovered that it could be incorporated within sauces to make them thicker. Turkish cuisine also features a cold sauce made from breadcrumbs mixed with pounded walnuts