Toast

Today

There's no doubt about it, toast made from my home-made bread is very special.Very crispy and good with jam. The slices are rather too large for our toaster so I cook them under the grill. Ordinary sliced bread goes in the toaster, of course. The toaster at the flat is a Dualit and relies on you depressing and raising a lever to get at the bread, unlike the standard pop-up toaster, and tends to allow smoke to waft perilously close to the smoke detector.

In My Day

At 4BH we actually owned a toasting fork which wasn't purely ornamental. In winter time when the fire was lit we would often make toast and do crumpets at the fire using this implement. There was an art to getting it just right. If you put it over flames, the bread would simply go up in flames too. But you wanted to avoid smokey bits as the toast then merely tasted sooty. The way to do it was to find a nice patch of hot glowing coals and hold the bread over that. There was a moment to be caught between the bread being merely rather hot and turning into charcoal. I think we often had to chuck away toast or eat charcoal and soot smeared with butter, because we'd missed these crucial details. Your face got pretty hot and red in the process and you became in need of refreshing cups of tea pretty regularly!

We did use the eye-level grill of our gas cooker to make toast as well. This was for many years rather above eye-level for me which made making toast hazardous in a different way.

How exciting it was when Daddy bought our first pop-up toaster! It was a dining room, not kitchen item and toast would be made at the table as we needed it. I think that it had two wide slots, each of which took two slices of bread. Mamma had by this time discovered Wonderloaf so toasting became a standardised process. To get your toast cooked on both sides you had to remove it after it had popped up and reverse the pieces. Daddy was a fan of what he called "Dutch Toast" whereby you had one toasted and one untoasted side, putting the butter and marmalade on the soft side. I don't know where Daddy got the name from; maybe he made it up so that this half-and-half affair would acquire some status and desirability. Certainly when I googled it I found images of rounded items that resembled large Melba toasts with unappetising slices of Gouda cheese on them!

What is interesting is that toast, probably originally a way of using up stale bread, is now an essential part of breakfast and is best made with fresh bread.