Toast People
There is a saying that if you do and or study anything long enough, with a curious and open mind, you will discover something of a universal truth. Now that I am exploring the eighth decade of life, I’ve had the chance to experience, through some lasting and passionate involvements, that there is at least some element of truth in the saying. I suppose any such epiphanies that arise would be abetted by one’s conscious desire to truly know God, or some conscious force greater than ourselves. It could happen after years of working with and closely observing bees. Or after a single day of witnessing a rare Siberian Jelly Fish mating. It can happen anywhere anytime if that supreme power really is omniscient, as in every atom and particle of light. Or the baker, kneading the dough, seeing it rise, and eventually seeing the smile of relief on Mrs. Somebody, replacing her expression of worry that the last of the city’s very best fresh sourdough is all out. What the heck is it about sourdough anyway, and toast in general?
There must be something unique and wonderful about toast that spurs so many cultures to have their own version. I ask you to consider the popularity of tortilla chips, croissants, pretzels, pancakes, etc., all basically just grain or nut or seed products whose taste is improved by being toasted. Sure, it prolly started when some cave person’s meat fell into the fire during a shoving match over food, the tussle ended, and Mr. Gragah retrieved his perfectly Cajun blackened Mammoth tri tip, and, voila! Cooked food. It would be quite a while before agriculture and grains would innocently make the scene, but maybe God was using those thousands of years to set the stage for the ultimate combination of food and physics, to provide for It’s/Hers/His humanoid creatures an uplifting experience necessary for the preservation of our species.
Yes, I’m talking about those first couple of bites, when one has a real appetite, into a perfectly cooked and treated piece of toast, the crunching sound audible at least fifteen feet away. You know that sound. You could distinguish it from all the other crunching sounds in a movie theater filled with popcorn munchers. Come to think of it, it’s odd that after all these years, theater concession stands still don’t have heated glass cases with rotating pieces of buttered toast proudly showing off their golden come hither glow. I must give some theaters credit for at least offering nachos, the toasted tortilla pieces and gooey cheese affair. Two more thoughts on popcorn: Being a toasted grain, it is actually a form of toast, and one that boasts the greatest association with entertainment. But isn’t it a bit perverse that some movies just don’t work for popcorn? They sell it, hell, promote it, in their pre-trailer screen activity, you’ve paid for it, gotten the extra butter in the middle, carefully paced yourself through the trailers and first part of the movie, eating single pieces thoughtfully until the movie starts intensifying, and the brain says, “now, I need a handful shoved in.” It’s good, followed quickly by another, and that is when the plot says goodbye to popcorn eaters. With maximum poignancy and seriousness taking over, suddenly the sound of anyone eating anything is slightly blasphemous. One worries that they might interfere with nearby patrons’ moment of the heart, and earn a look of stink eye or even a shush. How dare you put anything in your mouth, you boor, when the Aztec priest is raising his ceremonial knife to plunge it into the heart of the screaming little girl as her mother wails away close by? The larger music has dropped away, and is replaced by solemn solo flute, telling us all she will not be rescued. In an instant, popcorn eating has become cretinous.
Do I even have a lozenge? No, that won’t work either, as the wrapping is way too noisy. Meanwhile, in the movie on the other side of the wall, bodies and cities are being blown up, limbs and heads being severed amid screams of anguish, and popcorn is practically raining on the floor because people simply can’t shove the palmfuls in big enough or fast enough. Mayhem needs popcorn. Alien civilizations studying earthlings’ behavior still cannot figure this irony out. But I digress.
Toast people are just products of evolution. Further proof of evolution, if you will. After eating breakfast thousands of times, one naturally develops his or her preferences and prejudices. At a certain point, toast became the center point for my breakfasts. This actually becomes problematic when eating out. Prejudices? Absolutely. For example when a waiter or waitress is telling me my toast choices to go with the omelette are white or wheat, and they somehow say it in a tone of voice that suggests that they resent even having to offer a choice, I definitely prejudge and significantly lower my expectations. The more toast choices they offer the better the chance they’ll actually toast it. It does say “toast” on the menu, and yet here it is in front of me, only one of the two pieces slightly brown on part of one side. It’s barely warm, and is accompanied with a dish of two just out of the freezer, foil wrapped butter pats. You can’t really spread it, but rather distribute cut pieces of the pats as evenly as you can over the desolate surfaces. If you try to spread those pieces flat, the underdone toast disintegrates. The waitress has put my plate down last, if I’m eating with others, and she has turned on her heel in an instant, before I’ve had a chance to check out the toast. It’s unacceptable of course, and now I must wait at least a few minutes as I twist around in my seat, waving my arm to summon her back, to remind her I asked to have the toast toasted brown. Kind of like asking to have your milk served white. I will be polite, apologetic even, as I ask for the redo, for I am a toast whore.
Back in the kitchen, the chefs are a blur of activity amidst the height of the breakfast hour, and it’s not hard for me to imagine they are all about the main dishes. Toast is kind of a pain in the ass, with white bread and English muffins requiring completely different toasting time. They not only must toast it to brown, but usually butter it as well, another nuisance, which is done in a second with one brush swipe across the center of the piece of toast. Our first bites into toast will naturally be on the outside, which will have no butter. I don’t want my scrambleds to get cold, and have to send that back as well, so I nibble at it until the toast returns. Sometimes the toast comes back barely browner, or punitive brown, where it’s slightly burned. Did the chef, who will surely not light up with a smile when my toast is returned, also spit lightly on it after whispering “asshole” under his breath? Usually not, I assume, but…..
Oh look! That lady two tables over, working on an omelette is calling the waiter back. I can’t hear what she’s telling him, but she’s holding up the side dish of toast for him to take back. She has that effective apologetic look and smile to ensure the best outcome. My own anxiety vanishes in a second, and my face does indeed light up with a smile, as I feel the warm relief flooding my existence. A kindred spirit, another toast person, challenging the kitchen, and standing up for her noble cause! I am not alone. I will have to speak with her before we go our ways, and exchange any encouragement I can. I will remind her that she is not alone. If I am lucky, or just thinking clearly in the middle of all my toast fanatic complaining, I remember to compare my scene to those of the many who are fleeing wars, floods, famine, drought, zika virus, etc., hoping just to make it to a refugee camp somewhere.
To at least for a moment, acknowledge all that is right and ineffably fortunate. It automatically improves my culinary experience without doing anything different to the food. Amazing.
It’s almost ten in the morning, and as my wife sleeps deeply, with that well-known breathing noise commonly associated with deep sleep, I turn my attention to breakfast logistics. We are at a decent larger hotel, and I’ve been awake for a couple of hours, Room service is for me a last resort, as it is not possible to get hot crunchy toast without involving the city mayor. Room service toast is enshrouded with cloth napkins or the aluminum plate lid before leaving the kitchen. It might even arrive in room still somewhat warm, but the cozy enclosing of involves condensation, and ensures the loss of any crunch it might have once had. The butter pats will be hard. The only hope for good toast will be at the restaurant downstairs. They serve until eleven, but my wife, who indeed earns her sleep, may not make it. She’ll be fine with room service, and order something healthy like oatmeal, fruit and yogurt. I want my eggs, so at ten thirty, I leave a note and slip out. Things are winding down in the dining room, and I am easily seated. The buffet is the ticket, as I can’t trust the kitchen’s toast, but with the DIY toaster, I’m in control. The eggs won’t be as good, unless the place is a bit upscale and has an omelette chef, but these buffet scrambled eggs don’t look too dry. Suddenly there’s a disproportionate number of people clustered around the conveyor belt industrial toaster. I see their faces, and lo! Is that anxiety? Yes it is, and it’s recently been acknowledged by the medical society as one of the more serious forms of “buffet anxiety.” Apparently, toastosterone helps. What are these worries? You probably are familiar with them. My toast doesn’t seem to be coming out.
It that your piece of rye? Will my English muffin halves start burning if I put them through a third time? Should I twist that knob and speed the belt up a little? Did that kid take my toast?
It’s awkward: You don’t want to stand in the way, you don’t want to appear too concerned, and yet you don’t want to miss anything. Hey, didn’t we all go through this exact scenario at the airport’s luggage conveyor belt? I admit I do have a fair amount of intimacy with those toaster belt speed knobs, and I have to slow them way down to get English muffins done. I don’t know why those darn things take so long to toast, but when they’re really toasted, well, you’re going to have a great day.
Sometimes I just can’t help myself, and I can see my son rolling his eyes as I get up to approach the manager of a restaurant for a “short discussion.” I tell them all the same thing. I praise their egg dishes in general, and perhaps the ambience of the place as well, before bringing up the weak link. The manager’s giving me the look that implies he’s trying to determine whether I’m just a routine complainer, or if I actually have some feedback of value. I say with great surety and booming voice, eyes unnaturally bright with fervor, as I climb on top of the closest table, occupied or not, and proclaim that the way to God, to The Truth, to Salvation, is through toast and only through toast. I might actually start spittle screaming as I bring up how many times the face of Jesus has appeared on pieces of toast. What, are we imbeciles? No, that would be fun, a nod to my Gemini moon I suppose, but I do tell him that people will remember an average breakfast with eggs by the toast, not the eggs. But only if it has been done with care. They may not even consciously know why they want to return to that restaurant instead of others for a breakfast out, but deep in their primal beings they have been touched. Hot, perfectly crunchy and buttered toast is rarely served. And when it is, it is not forgotten, for it brings a touch of divinity to whatever eggs it is accompanying. “Look, April!” I blurt out excitedly to my wife. That lady who got her toast redone is also a “piler!” A genuine kindred piler who can’t enjoy her eggs unless they can be eaten piled atop toast, like an open-face sandwich. This requires well done toast, kind of like a pallet onto which the scrambled, fried, soft boiled, poached, or omeletted eggs can be loaded before the forklift fingers raise the glorious steaming load up to the waiting maw. I’ve trusted those underdone imposters way too any times, cursing as the load, two inches from that first bite, collapses onto my plate, my lap or the floor. This is a toast failure. There is the brief sense of shame and failure, as if a sympathetic groan should resound throughout the dining room. From nearby tables, “that’s what he gets for eating eggs with his fingers in public. Jesus. Did you see that? What was he thinking! He practically had his whole omelette on top of one piece of rye toast. Those pilers are disgusting.” I’m sorry. Please don’t tell my mother, And so that point came in my life where I started thinking about starting a restaurant in San Francisco that would be called the Temple of Toast. With breakfast served through lunchtime, it would offer the very best toast in the entire bay area. On any given day, one could order from at least fifteen kinds of bread, and have it grilled, flash toasted, or slow toasted (baked until brown). The rye breads would be from all over Europe, the sourdoughs would ruin you for run-of-the-mill sourdough, and though there might be soft background music, the dominant sound, honored with meticulously quiet dish-bussing, would be that of conversation and of crunching. I had thought that the solution to perfect toast was to actually have toasters or toaster- ovens on the tables. That once might have been possible, but with the ever-restricting ways of insurance, venues today struggle with even having candles. But aside from the possibility of a toaster and butter fire igniting a patron wearing a feather boa and a polyester outfit, and then having that whirling flaming dervish person rolling and thrashing around throughout the dinning-room, catching several other polyester wearing patrons on fire while screaming “towering inferno!,” there is an even worse possibility. Patrons would inevitably burn toast, and the smell of burned toast is the smell of blasphemy, of hell itself. The difference between the aroma of heaven and the stench of hell can be one minute. That cannot happen in The Temple. Patrons cannot be trusted to keep the temple sacred. But where else could you order Romanian hearty sourdough rye from the revered village Chennerg, high on Vilgot Mountain, or Estonian pepper cheese flat bread to go with your eggs? We could even handle gluten-free toast, which is next to impossible, and requires three times the toasting of conventional bread, due to the gluey anti-toasting nature of gluten free bread. The backs of the menus would have a brief spiel about how we’d exhaustively combed the world’s far corners to find and bring to western toasters the most exotic and delicious breads.
These would all have to be organic and non-GMO, the bane of grain. There would also be a menu back page with a tutorial on common toasting and buttering mistakes in the quest for crunchiness. An example of such would be to wait 20 to 30 seconds after the toast pops up to butter it, or lightly pre-butter both sides and toast 30% longer. The walls would be rife with toast culture art and posters, and the best of toast jokes. Toast jokes? Seriously? Sure, why just go online, and there are plenty, both good and lame. My current favorite has to do with being lacktoastintolerant.
Alas, starting and running a restaurant is one of the hardest small businesses, successful or not, and as I sifted through key considerations and feedback over a period of a few years, I decided it was a better fantasy than something I could take on. But somebody else might, and they’re welcome to the name. There are restaurants here and there named, simply, “Toast,” and at least they’ve got a noble and alluring name, but even they don’t really offer toast that is a serious cut above the rest. For that you need a toastaholic owner. TA’s? I’m afraid so, meeting right after the CA’s or Cheeseaholics Annonymous. I have to attend both these days, to little effect I must report. With time, I’ve become essentially an anonymous person, scuttling from one help meeting to another. Impulse control seems to me to be on par with fixing the ship’s diametric response relay switches on the NASA mission, necessary for re-entry, that have just failed in a horrifying display of showering sparks and popping noises. In other words, I have zero impulse control, and a fairly addictive personality, which is far better than having no personality, as in not existing. Nonetheless, I have been able to quit cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, crack, speed, heroine, opium, marijuana, meth, porn, nail biting, and even the daily news. But every man has his limits, and must know those, as Dirty Harry advises. Some things are just plain un-quitable.
I will always be like that man in the New Yorker joke, shown stranded on a twenty-foot island in the middle of the ocean. He holds a three-foot long pointed stick up to the day’s sun, squinting hopefully up at the piece of bread on the end of the stick.