Trenchers are a type of bread, often stale, that was used for serving food on, shaped like a large plate or bowl. It’s often characterized as being a specialty of cuisine in medieval europe, but the existence of trenchers is attested to in much earlier times as well, and as being around the world (really, anywhere where bread was ever made). Often, after the meal, the trencher would be given to the poor as alms, but often it was simply also eaten. Because, let’s be honest, eating a big ol’ hunk of bread that has all the food and sauces from your meal in it does sound pretty appetizing.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, trenchers are even the subject of a prophecy. In Book 3, Aeneas recounts to Dido how he heard a prophecy from Calaneo, chief of the Furies, that, while he and his men would eventually reach Italy, but

Never shall you build your promised city

Until the injury you did us by this slaughter

Has brought you to a hunger so cruel

That you gnaw your very tables.

This prophecy is not fulfilled until Book 7, when the Trojan refugees, after a lean feast, are so hungry that they happily eat up their trenchers as well. Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, makes a joke about how everyone’s so hungry that they’re considering eating their tables, at which point Aeneas realizes that, since trenchers are technically sort of a table, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

I now can tell you, my father Anchises

Revealed these secrets to me for he said:

"When you have sailed, son, to an unknown shore

And, short of food, are driven to eat your tables,

Then, weary though you are, hope you are home

Sadly, as time progressed, people began to make trenchers less and less as people decided to use wooden plates and bowls instead.

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