9 Little Known Facts On The Origin Of Bread Bowls

Bread is an amazing base or accompaniment for so many foods. Even stale bread can be used in a surprising number of dishes. You can also use bread as your dinnerware. Bread bowls are hollowed out round or loaf-shaped pieces of bread that are filled with a tasty meal that you eat along with them. Typical bread bowl fillings include clam chowder, soup, or chili. Bread bowls can technically be made with any kind of bread, but experts like the staff at the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts understandably recommend choosing bread that has "a thick and sturdy crust". Popular choices include sourdough, Italian, and pumpernickel bread. 

For years, consumers have been able to find bread bowls on offer at many restaurants, including national chain Panera and iconic San Francisco eateries like Boudin Bakery's Bistro Boudin, where they've long been a famous menu item. You can also make your own bread bowls at home. Many bread bowl recipes involve baking your own bread, but some cooks go the easy way, hollowing out rolls or boules they've bought already made. Either way, the results will probably be delicious. Plus, you'll only have to wash the spoon when you're done!

Bread bowls became popular on a large scale in the late 20th century, so they may seem like a bit of a recent novelty. However, they have a surprisingly long history and a number of precursors and variations. Let's tuck deep into the history of bread bowls to find out everything from where they came from to what their future might hold (besides chowder and soup).

You can't have a bread bowl without bread. Many sources will say that humans first started baking bread around 12,000-10,000 years ago. But archaeologists have recently found bread fragments in Jordan that date back 14,000 years ago, suggesting that bread baking may go back even further.  In addition to Jordan and other locations in the Middle East, early evidence of breadmaking has also been found in Europe and southwest Asia. 

Did our Neolithic ancestors have bread bowls? Probably not. For one thing, prehistoric bread was flatbread, not the round loaf you'd need for a bread bowl. The earliest evidence of yeast being added to bread comes from Ancient Egypt, dating to a much later 1300–1500 BCE. The Ancient Egyptians were master bread makers, creating not only standard round loaves of bread, but also adding spices to flavor certain kinds of loaves. They also sometimes made bread in decorative shapes, for example, in the shapes of animals. But there's no archaeological or written evidence that they took things a step further and used their bread to hold food.

We're not absolutely certain where or when the idea of using bread to hold or contain food originated, but the first known mention of it comes from ancient Rome. The ancient Romans had many ways to hold and serve food, including dishes and bowls made of pottery, and it turns out that bread may have been one of them.

Dating to 30-19 BC, Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid contains a few lines that mention trenchers, that is, slices of stale bread that food was served upon. In addition to being more like a plate than a bowl, Ancient Roman trenchers differed from bread bowls in another key way: typically, you wouldn't eat your trencher, since the bread wasn't fresh and was likely a bit hard to chew. In The Aeneid, the poem's hero, Aeneas, is told in a prophecy that he and his men will experience near starvation and will be hungry enough to eat their trenchers.

Trenchers survived the fall of Rome and seem to have become a somewhat common way to serve a meal during the Middle Ages. But their role had changed a bit. Instead of being the sort of thing no one would eat, leftover trenchers were often either given to the poor or shared with the person seated next to you at a meal or banquet. 

To this day, there are traces of this idea of sharing bread in many languages, including the English word "companion", with roots going back to the Latin phrase "com panis" (literally "with bread"). We now have the concept of using bread as an edible food recipient, and round loaves are also still common, but while there might have been some people who hollowed out their loaf of bread and nestled their food into it, bread bowls were not a widespread, recorded thing for a vast majority of the Middle Ages.

The idea of using food as an eating vessel isn't unique to Europe. A notable example is injera, which is what most traditional Ethiopian meals are served on. Similar to a crepe, although larger and with a spongy texture, injera is made from teff flour and other grains. Although the earliest archaeological evidence of injera making dates to 600 AD, journalist Medha Imam of Business Insider reports that this staple of Ethiopian cuisine was probably first made thousands of years ago. As Imam explains: "Once cooked, injera is topped with vegetable and meat dishes like yater kik alecha, made from yellow split peas..."

In some ways, injera is similar to medieval European trenchers. For instance, food is served on top of it, and it's shared with others at your table. But that doesn't just mean the person next to you. Typically, a large plate with injera at its base is placed at the center of the table and everyone shares. Another difference is that while trenchers weren't always eaten, or might have been eaten after a meal, injera is meant to be scooped up and eaten with your food.  So you could say that, although bread bowls originated in Europe, injera is a bit more bread bowl-like than medieval European trenchers were.

It was clearly only a matter of time before someone took a leap from edible plates to edible bowls, and it seems to have happened in the late Middle Ages in Ireland. This origin story involves an Irish nobleman, who was hosting a British duke in 1427 and wanted to leave a lasting impression on his guest. He did this by having bread loaves hollowed out and filled with soup. It always feels good when you cook something that turns out to be amazing, and that was what happened in this case; the duke was so impressed with the bread bowl that he gave its inventor enough funds to launch his own Dublin-based bread bowl shop.

If you delve into the history of bread bowls, this is the only reference you'll find that pre-dates modern times, and we don't have a lot of details about who this supposed bread bowl inventory was. That said, the story isn't completely far-fetched. After all, using bread as edible plates was common at this time, so someone could have easily thought of making bowls out of them. But whether or not bread bowls were invented in that particular year by that particular unnamed Irish nobleman is harder to determine.

One of the most common bread bowl fillings in the U.S. today is clam chowder. It took a few centuries for the bread bowl and clam chowder to find each other, though. While the bread bowl probably originated in the late Middle Ages, clam chowder was first made a little later, in France's Brittany region and in southwest England, around the 16th and 17th century.  A type of soup, clam chowder has many variations, but the best-known is probably New England clam chowder, which traditionally consists of bacon or pork, onions, potatoes, clam juice, and clams in a seasoned creamy sauce.

Like the pioneers, New England clam chowder traveled West, eventually making it to San Francisco, whose famous sourdough bread made for a perfect taste pairing. Today, New England clam chowder served in sourdough bread bowls is a beloved combination in restaurants and homes around the country. Clam chowder bread bowls are still so closely associated with San Francisco today that there's even a page devoted to them on the National Park Service's blog. One of the most famous places to try a classic clam chowder bread bowl in San Francisco is Boudin Bakery or its restaurant, Bistro Boudin. This San Francisco institution dates to 1849 and claims to be the home of "the original San Francisco sourdough", still using the same sourdough starter its founder brought to the city when the bakery first opened.

While bread bowls were becoming more prevalent in U.S. cuisine, in the early 20th century in Western Serbia, a similar dish was also evolving. Komplet lepinja is a hollowed-out bun filled with cream and scrambled eggs. The top of the bun is then replaced and the stuffed bun is baked for a few minutes in the oven, then usually drizzled with meat drippings (often called pretop in recipes). 

Although its appearance can vary, komplet lepinja is essentially a breakfast bread bowl. Unlike bread bowls in the U.S. and parts of Europe, though, there aren't any popular variations to the recipe. That said, it's often considered one of the best breakfasts in the world, so why change a good thing? If this description has your mouth watering, you're not alone! Luckily, if you can't get komplet lepinja at a local restaurant, you can find recipes online, including vegetarian and sandwich versions.

Although they had been served in certain restaurants and regions for a long time, bread bowls gained nationwide popularity in the U.S. in the late 20th century. By the 1970's, you could find bread bowls on the menu when you dined out in many restaurant, and also on recipe cards and in cookbooks. 

In the 1980's, chains like Panera began making them even more ubiquitous. While they might not be quite as popular as they were in their heyday, you'll still find bread bowls on the menu at many restaurants (including good old Panera), and if there aren't any in your area that are serving them up, countless online recipes will help you make your own. You can fill your homemade bread bowl with classics like clam chowder, spinach dip, chili , or anything else that catches your fancy (and fits into the bread). You could even think outside the soup and fill your bread bowl with a tasty salad instead.

Times are changing when it comes to the bread bowl. Fillings like clam chowder and chili have always been popular, but you can also find more unexpected fillings on the menu in some places. At the time of writing, even Boudin Bakery offers several different kinds of bread bowls in addition to their classic sourdough and clam chowder combination, including one filled with butternut squash soup.  Unique bread bowls aren't just a San Francisco thing, either; Panera has offered more unusual bread bowl fillings, including bacon mac and cheese. Countless other restaurants have no doubt followed suit over the years. 

Not only has it become easier to find more creative bread bowl fillings, but you can also find more things being made into edible bowls. These include edible burrito bowls, cheese bowls made of fried cheese, and chili cornbread bowls. You can even mold basic ground beef patties into edible bowls. And these are just ideas for savory bowls. You can also go sweet, with edible ice cream bowls, for instance, created from everything from pre-made, specially shaped ice cream cone bowls to cookie dough or pie crust. Bread bowls may have a long history, but they're also a dish that allows you to get creative. It will be interesting to see what new spins on bread bowls will be created in the future. But judging by their staying power, it's also likely that centuries-old favorites like the good old clam chowder bread bowl will probably still be bringing comfort and deliciousness to diners for many years to come.