Ploughman's lunch 29 April 1958 refer to a ploughman's lunch consisting of bread, cheese and pickle. The meal's rise in popularity during the 1970s has been argued to be at least partially based on a British cultural "revulsion from technology and modernity and a renewed love-affair with an idealised national past". The meal was, however, primarily favoured by caterers because it was simple to prepare, required no cooking, was not labour-intensive and involved no meat, meaning there was the potential of high profit margins. The 1983 film "The Ploughman's Lunch", from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the
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