What should we call the end slice on a loaf of bread?

At MSN yesterday, in a feature called The Daily Meal, there was an article by Lily Rose titled What the heck do you call the end slice on a loaf of bread? After British actor Stephen Mangan called it the heel there were a bunch of silly Twitter responses by folks who hated that jargon term.

But that article only scraped the surface for the topic. Lily didn’t bother to dig down and look in the Oxford English Dictionary to see when heel was first used. It had appeared in the poem Piers Plowman by William Langland from back in 1370 (spelled heele) – over six centuries ago!

  

The Merriam-Webster dictionary also says a heel is one of the crusty ends of a loaf of bread. The text accompanying the Wikimedia Commons image for caraway rye bread shown above says in German it is known as Der Kanten.

I don’t remember ever not knowing it was called a heel, but my mother majored in home economics - so I learned the term a very long time ago. When I microwave a hot dog as a snack, I use a heel as a makeshift bun.

Bread making has lots of other jargon terms, like Biga and poolish for pre-ferment.