a wordlight bread

The Southern name for white yeast bread — a store loaf or a soft bun — as against cornbread, biscuits and pone, a dense cornmeal cake. On a Carolina barbecue tray it is what the sandwich is built on: chopped barbecue and slaw on a soft white bun. At the Skylight Inn the sandwich is on a white roll; Dukes buffets in South Carolina set out white bread beside the hash. Dictionary.com labels the term Midland and Southern U.S., and defines it as white bread or any bread leavened with yeast.

The word is old on the farm and young on the menu. Dictionary.com dates light bread to 1815–25; it is light in the baker's sense, risen with yeast, against the heavy cornmeal breads that fed the South because wheat would not keep in its heat. The barbecue sandwich is a twentieth-century form — Wikipedia says the tradition of whole hog as a sandwich filling began in the 1900s, and Melton's in Rocky Mount sold a barbecue sandwich for 15 cents in 1929 — and the bread it needed was the soft white bun that machine-sliced loaves made ordinary from the 1920s. The bun is never the point: Wikipedia's barbecue-sandwich article says the bread keeps the meat from drying and holds its heat, and in the east the slaw goes on the bun. Tradition holds — the tray, barbecue and slaw without bread, is the order for people who do not want the light bread at all; hushpuppies and cornsticks are the tray's bread and light bread the sandwich's. NCpedia's sides are baked corn sticks and fried hush puppies.