If you can believe what you see in all those period dramas from the BBC, the Brits, especially the Victorians, always cut the crust off the bread for sandwiches, especially those delicate little cucumber ones they serve with tea. Trimming the bread crust makes the sandwiches more elegant, of course, but I wonder if they really did that because they didn't have plastic bags to keep the bread in. The bread pretty much sat around in the larder, and the crust probably got very hard.
In fact, now that I think back on the kind of paper wrappers bread came in when I was a kid, not to mention the bread boxes we kept it in that were hardly air-tight, I wonder why we didn't cut off the crusts too. My mother would have considered it a waste, I'm sure.
When it came to Grandma's wonderful Bohemian bread dumplings, however, my mother dutifully cut the crust off the bread just like Grandma's recipe said. I asked Grandma why she did that, if the crusts would hurt anything, and she said no, it was just because of the dark color of the crusts. She was into monochrome dumplings. My mother discarded the crusts, but Grandma always put them out in the yard for the birds.
When I make those dumplings I throw the leftover crust out. The one time I put it out in the yard for the birds, the dogs at it.
I had toast this morning, that's what brought all this on. I was trying to find a way to get butter all the way to the edge so the crust wasn't so dry. I finally gave up.
But it also reminds me of the story my partner told about her uncle, who hated bread crust. When he was a kid, he would hide it under the rim of his dinner plate which, when removed, left a perfect ring of bread crusts on the table.
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