Toast

"I don't have anything to say about toast."

Intro (Tonya):

Today's piece is the result of both my writer's block and of Paul's generous nature. I have been struggling to put words onto paper lately. A deathly problem, if you've ever experienced it. My brain goes from "I haven't written anything in a week" to "This is it. I will never write again. I'm a hack and a failure" in roughly 0.25 seconds, and then in self-fulfilling fashion, it repeats itself ad nauseum and drowns out any other thoughts that could, theoretically, become writing. 

Paul knows about this problem of mine and can, I think, relate to it. So when I told him last week that I wasn't writing, he suggested we should work on something together. We'd been talking about writing something together for a long time. Why not now? Just something simple—a back and forth. He would start and then I could respond, and then he could respond back to me, and so on. 

"Why not write about toast?" He asked me. I was eating toast. 

"Toast? I don't feel like writing about toast." 

"You love toast. You talk about it all the time."

"I don't have anything to say about toast."

"Let me send you something about toast. If you don't want to write anything back, that's fine. We can try something else."

Maybe a half hour later, he sent me the following email...

Paul:

TOAST is something I have loved since before I could spell. It doesn’t count for this piece, but my mom would feed me a commercially available biscuit called “Zweiback” toast. I liked it, especially after dipping it in coffee, heavy with milk and sugar. Yes, they let me drink coffee from a very young age - maybe 4? - and I’d dip the Zweiback in it and then suck on it before swallowing each piece. I also loved Stella D’Oro anisette toast. They were a local bakery and I’m not sure they still exist and I’m too lazy to search the web for the information. I’d rather it stay a mystery. They made a crisp and a spongy version and I favored the spongier version, but I happily would eat a whole package of either in a sitting. And I was a skinny kid. There was something about the staff of life - wheat - baked into a shape and then sliced and toasted that rang bells with my DNA.

We had a toaster, a classic model that I have since searched for on eBay, but have resisted buying so far - a Toastmaster - and it made fantastic toast. You think I’m waxing a little crazy here? I recently found an article on the World Wide Web about the technical superiority of old toasters. Something about the metallurgy of the coils. Whether it was that or my dad’s Great Depression-era attitude and training as an engineer, he kept that thing going for 50 years. He would rebuild it, fashion parts and poke around, kind of like another guy might with a weekend hot rod. They eventually succumbed and bought a newer toaster, but I’m not sure it felt the same, that toast. And how did it feel? The toast I grew up with had butter and jam, usually some supermarket brand like Smuckers, and the whole trick was to eat it as quickly as I could. Some foods have a shorter half life than others and toast is one of those foods. It lasts about as long as its aroma lasts, wafting up the stairs to the bedroom of my youth.

I’m going to hand this off to Tonya and see what she has to say about her personal toast origins before we get into the philosophy behind toast.

Tonya:

Oh God, should I be able to remember my childhood toaster? I love toast more than anything, but I have no memory of it. I know it was a two-seater, because I do remember coming upon a four-slice model once and being thoroughly astounded. I remember that my grandma Ernestine, my father's mom, taught me to love toast with peanut butter, which is still a favorite (though now I tend to add fruit on top.) And I also remember my friend Ashley in the 1st grade showing me how to spread butter and sugar on a tortilla, wrap it up inside a paper towel, and warm it in the microwave... which isn't exactly toast, I guess. I'm getting off topic.

The thing is, I grew up in a classic 80's/90's "healthy" home. No bacon, no steak, no butter. Sometimes we had those horrible SnackWell cookies around, but true desserts were saved for holidays; even then, they were often made with artificial sweeteners. We had sugar-free ice cream in the freezer. Diet coke and margarine in the fridge. What I'm saying is, toast was where it was at. It was the best I could do. And what's not to love? It's warm bread, which is truly one of man's greatest inventions, and it oozes with butter (or margarine, if this is 1995) and jam (or sugar-free preserves, as the case may be.) It's the perfect amount of sweet. It's crunchy and it's soft at the same time. Until I learned to bake, I had toast. You could say it's what made me who I am. It sounds ridiculous, but I've said more ridiculous things in my life. I love toast. I just love it.

I don't know where to go from there, so I want to hear what Paul says next...

Paul:

Wow, that’s a lot! First thing that comes to mind is, how many young people are named “Ernestine” anymore? Was there an Ernest in the family? Did they eat toast? The second thing that you make me consider is the whole notion of a healthy home and where food stood in it. My mom was the classic nuclear family housewife - frozen food was the future, along with cans, you served the three food groups or something like that and you tried to limit junk food. The problem was that the food industry had not quite caught up. So it was Arnold’s or Pepperidge Farm white bread for the most part in my youth. We’d occasionally get a loaf of fresh bread at a bakery and I’d basically eat the whole thing. It was still white, though, and usually from an Italian bakery. I’d rip big hunks of bread off the loaf and just shove them into my mouth, un-toasted, no butter, au naturel. So it’s interesting that you draw the line between toast and “junk food.” Toast would seem to bridge the chasm between “junk” and “real.” Your recollection turned the topic of toast into a story of deprivation almost, with sugar free ice cream, margarine and Diet Coke, although some might argue that the latter three items represent a new peak in civilization.

As for civilization, a bit of googling tells me - whether it’s true or not, I do not know - that toast may have originated as a way to preserve bread. Even though bread was maligned and mistreated by the end of the 20th Century in some circles, it’s worth remembering that civilization would not have come this far without bread. The Romans made it popular and, in fact, the word “toast” comes from the Latin word “tostum,” which means “to scorch or burn.” Toasters came along later, after electricity entered our lives. Not that long ago, really, and only after some advances in metal alloys, it became possible to make toast without burning down the house. Another thing that advanced the cause of modern toast was the advent of pre-sliced bread. I could go on, but that’s for another day. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there on the web. I personally prefer to do my own searching and not let so-called “artificial intelligence” do it for me, but I’m a stick-in-the-mud. I’d encourage you to go to Wikipedia - or elsewhere - and search for “buttered toast phenomenon” if you want to learn something interesting.

I wanted to keep it to just two paragraphs, but why limit myself? Except when it comes to toasters. Somehow, a 4-slot machine seems wrong, but I come from a small family. I can see the usage-scenario for a 4-slot machine. It’s just not within my own experience, so it’s meaningless to me. Tribalism. The last thing I’ll note is your phrase, “man’s greatest invention,” which begs to open a discussion in using “man” as shorthand for “humanity.” I won’t go there, though. I already ate my toast for the day, so I’ll have to do something else. It was two slices of what I call “Dave’s Prison Bread,” a brand that’s doing well. There’s a note on each bag of bread about redemption and prison and how Dave spent 15 years in jail and now makes bread. It’s actually called “Dave’s Killer Bread” and I get nothing for mentioning it, but it’s pretty good, especially toasted with some butter and jam.

Tonya:

I'm happy to have that etymology lesson about the Romans. A truly messed-up empire, but they knew about food. I just can't ever get into the whole Paleo mindset - the idea that we're supposed to eat like pre-agricultural humans. You know what life was like for pre-agricultural humans? It was short. You know how long we've been eating wheaty stuff? Thousands of years. If we have a problem, it isn't bread. It's probably to do with your childhood and my childhood—canned soups, Pepperidge Farm bread, frozen dinners. The whole American shebang. 

Toast is, yes, basically just adding fire to bread. But it's also much more than that. It's about the kind of bread, for one thing. The typical thin-sliced American bread is always either woefully undertoasted or else it bakes into a cracker. Undertoasted thick bread, though, unless it's truly excellent bread (in which case it doesn't really need toasting) becomes an unappealing wad of gum in your mouth. The perfect toast is somewhere in the middle. It should be crisp on top. All the delicate sugars in the slice should rise to the surface and caramelize without truly burning. The interior should be soft (not too soft) and warm.  You see what I mean? It's a delicate business. 

The saddest toast is cold toast, of course—the toast you set down two minutes ago. And there is no sadder toast than the cold plate of toast they bring you with your eggs in a typical American diner. The thin mass-produced bread, five minutes out of the toaster, stacked butterless on a ceramic plate. I've eaten enough of it over the years, dicing frozen butter from the packet onto the bread and then the smear of Smuckers jelly, but always with disappointment and ennui. 

We haven't even gotten into butter—I have such strong opinions about butter, having experienced real butter from countries with functioning regulatory systems—or jam (which MUST be jam and not jelly, that depressing fruit-adjacent goo.) I realize this all sounds like snobbery, but it isn't. It's about simplicity. In its simplest, purest form, toast is the perfect food. The more complicated, the worse it gets. 

Actually, what time is it? I think there's some of that prison bread around here somewhere. 

(Thanks for the nudge, Paul.)

---

*All toasters by Tonya M.*

---

If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.

If it gave you any thoughts, please leave a comment.

If you think others would enjoy it, hit re-stack or share:

If you’d like to read more:

And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always help with a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.

---

Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity,” in 2021, and “Exit Culture” in 2023.

Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.