Toast
Yesterday, I promised I would start on a food blogging binge, and so I have.
Human’s aren’t smart to cook things, we are smart because we cook things. Cooking gave us a second stomach. We can predigest plants and meat outside of ourselves through the use of fire. It is fire that expanded our dietary repertoire, which in turn allowed us to grow our nutritionally expensive big brains.
One of our ancestors in East Africa discovered that cooked meat tastes better. In the now largely discredited book The Forest People, which I read as a teen, Colin Turnbull tells the story of watching Mbuti tribesmen roast birds over a fire and eat parts of them while the birds continue to flap their wings. When the author asks the tribesmen why they roast and eat the birds without killing them first, the men reply, “they taste better this way.” Makes sense to me. My brother cooks soft-shell crabs alive for the same reason.
If cooking things once is good, cooking them twice is better. We have been using fire to cook things for close to half-a-million years, but how long have we been double cooking things? When did we discover the twice baked potato? Who figured out that lasagna and baked ziti were better than fresh pasta? The secret of New York style cheesecake is that it is twice baked. Being able to turn wheat into bread is what made civilization possible, but double cooking is what makes being civilized so… yummy.
The first thing you learn to cook as a child is toast. Among Suburbanites there is an important maturational ritual that marks a child’s initiation to the world of cooking. When the child is ready, and suburbanites know the child is ready when he or she can get their own milk and prepare cereal properly, an adult instructs the youngling on how to use the “toaster” (if the family owns a toaster-oven the ritual may be delayed until successful completion of the ‘chocolate milk test’). The most important part of the instruction is the first invocation of the admonition to “never put a fork in the toaster.” “Never put a fork in the toaster” is one of the earliest and most important of the suburban taboos.
I had achieved the rank of “master toaster” by the age of nine, but the “toast feast” did not happen until I was in sixth grade, which I think is about eleven. I seldom went home after school. I usually went to somebody else’s house and, if I remembered, called my mother to say I would be home by 5:30.
I had a friend from Kindergarten, named KvK, who often invited me over. When we got to his house we would have a snack. The snack was almost always toast.
Toast is a seemingly simple thing, but good toast does not hold. The quicker you eat it, the better it is. Toast is also improved by attention. The more familiar you are with the toaster and the more you watch the process, the better the toast will be.
James Beard, in his book, Beard on Bread, lamented the state of toast and reminisced about making toast on an open fire:
My thoughts go back a long way to the days when I first lived in England and one would still use a toasting fork in front of the fire to toast bread, crumpets, and muffins for tea. Never, never, never has toast smelled or tasted as good…
Now, if you read yesterday’s post, you know that Beard is confusing process with timing, and that the most important part of his experience is that his taste buds were still working, but I will concede that the attention needed to toast with a fork probably made the toast superior.
KvK and I paid attention. We watched the toaster with what Jon Krakauer calls “pornographic intensity”, and we discussed, as only the young will do, our theories about how dark or light the toast should be.
We were toasting white bread. KvK’s family was from Germany, and they didn’t buy the cheap Wonder or Sunbeam bread that my family bought. They bought Pepperidge Farm white bread, and, if you know anything at all about toast, you know that Pepperidge Farm and Arnold white breads make the best toast.
We never trusted the toaster. We either popped up the bread by forcing the lever, or used a pair of wooden tongs to end the toasting.
We sometimes topped the toast with butter or jam, but most often with a spread that KvK called “schmea.” The word was similar to the Yiddish “Schmear”, but without the final “r”. He made it by mixing mayonnaise, tomato paste, and a little bit of mustard. We spread that on the toast, and one day the two of us ate a whole family size loaf of bread. We sat at a small kitchen table after school, the toaster between us, with nothing but time and hunger to guide the progress of one of my life’s eating highlights.
KvK is still a friend. Our loaf-of-bread toast banquet is now properly mythologized. Neither his children nor mine want to hear about it. You had to be there. Toast has never tasted so good.
I now eat low-carb When Pig’s Fly bread. It toasts like birdseed on rye. I’ll admit that I enjoy it, as I enjoy all carbs, but most of my enjoyment comes from the the fact that I am still in control of the toaster. I can give the toasting the attention it deserves. You can’t get good toast at a restaurant, hospital, or retirement home. You should be thankful if you get to cook the twice cooked bread yourself. It taste’s better that way.
Others in This Series
- Why the best meals are the ones that you ate before 15 (6/8/2016)
- Childhood Sweets: Fluff & Dusty Millers (6/19/2016)
- The BLT (8/17/17)
- Tortoni (1/6/18)
