"He's got a Piece of Bread and Cheese in his Head" = "He's drunk"?

[Joel S. Berson]

Yes, it does appear in print, in a context clearly indicating its
meaning.  I would like to keep the source private, since I am writing a paper.

The response I got from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh:

>Unfortunately, this was just a descri[p]tive quote used on the webpage and
>there is really no background information available about it.  I think if
>you read the sentence before the "bread and cheese" line, it is to the
>Italian phrase which refers to a drunken man.  One can only surmise that
>because the combination of bread and cheese was very dense and thick, so
>would be the condition of a drunkard's head.
>
>The Italians do not say of a drunken man that he has a "souse" or a
>"skate" unless the Americanizing process is nearly complete. Instead they
>say, "He has a piece of bread and cheese in his head;" "He is as drunk as
>a wheel-barrow," or "The malt has got above the water."
>
>  As the article was written in 1910, we just do not have any more
> explanation about it that [than] what we could determine ourselves.
>
>Cindy Ulrich
>Pennsylvania Department
>Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Joel

At 6/4/2005 10:52 PM, you wrote:
>First one might like to establish that the expression exists or existed at
>all.
>
>I do see on the Web a quotation from a Pittsburgh newspaper from 1910
>stating that this expression was used by "Italians", but in isolation this
>assertion could easily be erroneous, deliberately false, or only marginally
>true (e.g., the expression could be a casual translation [accurate or not]
>of something in Italian which was seldom or never really used in English).
>
>Is there an example of the above expression actually used to mean "he's
>drunk" in any printed work?
>
>-- Doug Wilson