IF LIFE IS A BOX OF CHOCOLATES, MAKE MINE TOAST

CHRONICLE: ALBUQUERQUE, 2024 WITH STOPS IN NEW YORK CITY AND MASSACHUSETTS

No offense to chocolate–I eat dark chocolate daily–but today’s chronicle is about toast. Thanks so much for reading LKC. Your support means everything!

Today’s toast…whole wheat sourdough with goat cheese and sliced radishes. Cinnamon sugar and raspberry jam on board.

I wasn’t always a toast eater, but now, eating morning toast is a daily ritual.

I’m kind of in love with toast.

When a hankering for pancakes (like those pumpkin cottage cheese ones I like) or buttermilk waffles surfaces, I listen. I’m mesmerized by how the butter melts, oozes, anticipating its richness. Pancakes and waffles are good, especially when I team them up with maple syrup and fresh berries. But part of me is left wanting, unsatisfied, craving, the crunch of morning toast.

There is nothing like it.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, started his day with toast too. His breakfast, the same every morning, consisted of black coffee, half a grapefruit, (no sugar), and a piece of dry toast, cooked to the charry brink. His New York City apartment smelled of that scratchy, almost burned toast well into the afternoon after we’d returned from visiting the Bronx Zoo, or the Museum of Natural History, or window shopping on Fifth Avenue at Christmastime.

When I was young, I didn't always enjoy toast eating.

Sometimes eating toast was like eating a piece of parchment, all ragged and rough and crinkly, almost hurtful to swallow. Well, I never ate a piece of parchment, but you get my drift. As a kid, I couldn’t understood how my grandfather ate his toast without even a smear of butter, or cream cheese or something. Anything! But as Grandpa was fond of saying, chacun à son goût…each to their own taste.

Toast begs for toppings; seems lonesome and sad without the things that it best goes with.

Even now, all these years later, dry, naked toast seems like a sin. My ideal brunch party menu includes a toast station where everything and anything goes. There would be sourdough, whole wheat oat, and banana bread to choose from. Toppings would include lox, cream cheese, chocolate sprinkles, peanut butter, fruit jams, lemon curd, jammy eggs, Nutella, pickled red onions, thin shaves of prosciutto. The possibilities are endless and I’m getting hungry just thinking about them.

As I tried to become a toast eater, I discovered that I liked my toast lightly browned with a hint of a tan. And I never ate it without something adorning the top. My favorite was, and still is, a bit of butter spread under a dollop of jam. Raspberry jam is my favorite, apricot a close second.

Photo: Maguiss at Pixabay.

But the older I got the toastier I wanted my toast to become.

There were mornings when I wanted my house in Baltimore to smell like Grandpa’s apartment in New York City. I began putting the toast through an extra cycle, standing guard over the coils, hoping for a slightly deeper tanned piece of bread in the end. Inevitably though, I found myself scraping blackened char from the toast before I could eat it. There was a fine line between toast that had a deep tan and toast that was simply too far gone. These pieces of too far-gone toast were inedible, charred beyond repair. No amount of scraping away their burned bits would make them better. On those mornings, when there was no hope, the only solution was to start the toasting process over with the promise of a fresh piece of bread.

One of the best ways to eat toast is covered in cinnamon sugar. On sick days, when I stayed home from school, my mother would bring me cinnamon toast on a tray with a glass of orange juice or a honey sweetened cup of tea depending on the illness. When my son was small, I made so much cinnamon toast for him–mostly as a treat since he was rarely sick– that I began keeping a shaker of cinnamon sugar at the ready, much easier than mixing up a spoonful of sugar and cinnamon each time I made a piece of toast for him. When I got the idea for the sugar and cinnamon shaker, I was thunderstruck. What a genius, I thought to myself. Honestly, it was like I had just woken up to the fact that the earth is indeed round.

To this day, I keep a shaker of cinnamon sugar front and center on my spice shelf.

I am in good company when it comes to toast. Nobody says it better than Nigel Slater, who begins his book Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, with this:

       “It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten. Putty in their hands.”

I couldn’t agree more.

When I was in my twenties, before my husband and I were married, we regularly visited his grandmother just outside of Boston. Harriet’s first question after our two-hour drive from Northampton was, Are you hungry? She didn’t really wait for us to answer. She almost always had her apron on, and in a matter of mere moments she’d crank on the burner and make each of us an open-faced fried egg sandwich on a piece of toast for lunch. She slathered the toast with plenty of room temperature butter, slid the sunny side up eggs on top. With a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper we were sitting down to one of the best meals I can remember.

I often fry eggs for breakfast. Topping my toast with them after spreading room temperature butter on my toast is a go to move. But no matter how hard I try, and try, and try, my open-faced fried egg sandwich never tastes the way I remember Harriet’s tasting, even after that pinch of salt and grind of pepper. I’ve concluded that the missing ingredient is Harriet. There’s no other explanation.

Cromaconceptovisual at Pixabay..

My house smells of toasting bread most mornings. The smell lingers but only for a short while, unmistakably evident when I return from my morning walk. By afternoon, the smell has dissipated, an open invitation for the next day’s toasty beginning.