Newfoundland’s BREWIS A traditional Sunday morning breakfast in Newfoundland and Labrador is fish and brewis. The fish in this dish was often salt cod, before the collapse of the cod fishery. Brewis is hard bread or hard tack, also known as ship's biscuit or sea-biscuit, soaked in water and cooked with salt cod or another salted fish, and often served with scrunchins, which are cubes of fat-back pork fried golden brown and tossed over the brewis as a garnish or mixed right in with the cod and bread. Hard tack is a dry biscuit or bread made of flour and water with no salt, often baked in large ovals. It keeps for months. It must be soaked or dipped in hot liquids to be eaten easily. Many islanders consider brewis the best use of hard tack ever invented. Brewis has several spelling variants and pronunciations but is usually said as “broos.” In the lyrics of four different Newfoundland songs, brewis is rhymed with spruce in one ditty, with news in another, with lose in a third, with youse in the fourth. Local folk etymology claims the word derives from breaking, that is bruising, the hard biscuit, before soaking it—a fine old practice reflected in one complimentary catch phrase of Newfoundland: “as fine a b'y as ever broke a cake o’ bread.” The folk etymology is colourful but incorrect.
Brewis existed as a word in Middle English, a period of development in our language usually dated from 1150 to 1450. The earliest printed reference in English occurs around 1300 in The Lay of Havelok the Dane as “make the broys in the led” which means “make the brewis in the lid,” that is, remove the convex lid of a pot or cauldron, turn it upside down and use the hollow to make a sauce. In this case, it means to ladle broth from the pot into the lid, then put the lid, still upside down, back on top of the pot, and make sops by putting hunks of hard bread into the liquid.
As one who has tasted this scrumptious dish, I can only quote one outport cook on brewis: “She tastes a fair bit better ‘n she sets.” Brewis or browis (or one of a dozen variant spellings) entered Middle English and Scots from a Norman French form of Old French brouetz, a soup made with meat broth, itself a diminutive of Old French bro or breu. It caught on in English by popular association with an Old English cognate, briw, plural briwas, a word for soup. All of these words, including the English verb brew, hark back to the Indo-European mother tongue, where bhereu was a verbal root whose meanings included stirring, warming, and boiling. Distantly related words in English, fifth cousins of brewis, are braise, bread, breath, breeze, broil, broth, and imbrue. Latin cognates include the roots of English words like effervescent, ferment, fervent, and fry. The Bourbons who once ruled Naples, Spain, and France took their surname from a town in central France originally named after Borvo, a Celtic god of warmth.
The Brewis Bag Some Newfoundland kitchens stock a special implement called a brewis bag, a netlike pouch in which to soak the pieces of hard tack and boil them, after which the pieces are dumped in a colander to drain. Thus, one who does not retain imparted information, who is scatter-brained or forgetful, may be chastised in Newfoundland with the outport snub: “He have a head like a brewis bag.”
© 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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