To coat with flour or crumbs and egg or liquid prior to cooking.
Until about a thousand years ago, baked lumps of dough were not known as bread, but rather as hlaf. The word bread did exist back then, but it simply meant piece or fragment: if you dropped a pottery jug, each piece would be called a bread, the plural of which was breadru. Gradually, however, the word bread came to be identified with the pieces of hlaf eaten at every meal, a shift that occurred simply because these pieces were the most important ones in the household, the ones that kept everyone alive. In time, this new meaning widened further and bread took the place of hlaf as the general name for any product made by baking dough; hlaf did not die out, however, but simply evolved into the word loaf, now meaning a single “unit” of bread, instead of bread in general. As a slang term for money, the term bread probably grew out of Cockney rhyming slang; this slang, which was to some extent a real code but for the most part just a verbal game, replaced certain common terms with a phrase whose final word rhymed with the word being replaced. Bowl of water, for example, replaced daughter, while apples and pears took the place of stairs. Sometimes the last half of the phrase was eventually dropped; thus, bread and honey, the rhyming slang for money, was reduced to just bread. This sense of bread is not recorded until the middle of the twentieth century, but, considering that it originated as slang, it was probably in spoken use much earlier.
As a verb, the action of enveloping a food item, such as a cutlet or slices of meat, eggplant, etc., with bread crumbs, typically following a dip in beaten egg.
Dating back to as early as 2000 BC, bread was considered a significant component of the Egyptian diet. In England, traces of baked bread were discovered and consumed during the Stone and Iron Ages. In modern times, bread, along with other cereal-based food products, contributes to over a quarter of the total energy, protein, carbohydrate, and iron in a typical household’s daily sustenance. Apart from being a rich source of calcium, niacin, and thiamin, bread also provides crucial amounts of calcium, iron, and B vitamins, which are often depleted during the flour milling process. As a remedy to this loss, these nutrients are subsequently added to white flour.