Bread Soldiers: Meant To Be Eaten, Not For War

We generally tend to associate the word "soldier" with war and military activities. However, the word soldier is also a cookery term which means a strip of bread or toast that is dipped into a soft-boiled egg.
What is the ideal width for a toast soldier? The answer, according to Mike Minton (who has just invented a new labour-saving toast-cutting device to make the perfect soldier), is 22mm. Although dipping toasted bread into a soft-boiled egg cannot be an exclusively English pastime, the nickname does seem to be a typically English whim. Why the English started calling the thin dipping strips of toast “soldiers” is anybody’s guess, but astonishingly, the term does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary in its breakfast context until 1966. Some people think they are called soldiers because they are (or should be) uniform size, standing firm and straight like soldiers do.