Bread was typically eaten with some kind of moistener, usually based on an oil or sugar.

Bread or some other staple starch formed the foundation of the diet, and the term was sometimes used as a synecdoche, in which a part of something (bread) was used to refer to the whole (diet). "Give us this day our daily bread," for example, refers generically to food, and not merely to bread on its own. However, as Sidney Mintz discusses in his wonderful history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, while the main starch could be the food itself, it often couldn't culturally count as a proper meal unless it had the right accompaniment. Historically, in the West where bread was the starch, this has been some kind of moistener: in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, olive oil is the standard; in northern Europe, it was frequently butter; with the development of plantation sugar production in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and industrial food in the nineteenth century, jam became a very popular food for this role in Britain. In other cases, it might be "drippings," a generic term for the fat or moisture produced by cooking meat in certain ways. Of course, bread was also a ubiquitous accompaniment to all kinds of other dishes. Soup, for example, always comes with bread, to the point that in some situations, soup alone might not be considered an actual meal.

I should note that I specialize in the study of wheat, flour, and bread in modern Britain. And, while the sandwich was invented famously by the Earl of Sandwich in the eighteenth century, I actually come across very few references to it before the invention and proliferation of sliced bread. While not unknown before the 1930s, I think the sandwich as the staple form of making a meal out of bread is really a postwar development. In the period that I study, mostly 1750 to 1950, the standard is bread and butter, bread and jam, or bread and drippings.