Kingsmill Bread Is Rubbish
The world of the premium white sliced loaf is an odd one.
On the one hand we have Hovis. It’s sold as being bread. Not posh bread, just bread. Which is it all it is, really. A bit more expensive, but at heart it’s white sliced, only more so. Nice and moist, fine texture, tastes a bit more bready than Tesco Value, makes a good bacon butty. These are all obviously good things, and it’s what I end up buying more often than not.
And then we have Kingsmill. Launched into the world by the faintly ridiculous ‘Bread and Butler’ advertising campaign, the Kingsmill brand has always had a specifically posh aura about it. This is embodied in the bread itself. Rather than adopt the Hovis white-sliced-only-better approach, it aspires to the condition of your actual traditional square tin loaf ie Proper Posh Bread. It does this by having a drier, coarser texture and, as Dave B points out below, smelling of fish.
Now, the latter is obviously a serious misstep unless you happen to be making fish finger sarnies, but it’s the former that really gets to me. Yes, Proper Posh Bread is a bit drier than sliced white, but it’s also more elastic. This means it can cope with a serious bit of buttering. Kingsmill can’t. Unless your butter is on the point of melting its weirdly textured slices tear as soon as they makes contact with your knife. It’s a sandwich bread that you can’t actually make sandwiches with. Marvellous.
In conclusion: Kingsmill = rub. So why is it that whenever I am forced to do a bit of emergency bread shopping it’s so much easier to find than Hovis? Do we live in a nation of snobs who like their sandwiches torn and smelling of fish? Or is there some sinister cartel forcing corner shops and Paddington Sainsburys to stock nothing but Kingsmill?