Tea and toast

The British love their toast. In British households, there can be toast at any given time of the day. Toast can be breakfast, spread with butter or jam, accompanied by a cup of steaming tea and a conversation around the kitchen table. Toast can also be snatched out of the toaster and clamped firmly between your teeth while putting on your shoes and rushing out the door in the morning. Toast can be a three-course meal: buttered toast is followed by eggs on toast, baked beans, baked tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, Marmite for the lovers or avocado for the Millennials. Finally, toast can be dessert, spread with marmalade or jam.

The oldest way to toast bread was with the help of a toaster fork. The slice of bread was punctured onto the toaster fork and turned around in front of an open fire until it was sufficiently toasted. Toasted bread may well be an English invention. In 1748, the Scandinavian visitor Pehr Kalm wrote a theory in his diary about how toasting bread became popular in England:
‘The cold rooms here in England in the winter, and because the butter is then hard from the cold, and does not admit of being spread on bread, have perhaps given them the idea thus to toast the bread, then spread butter on it while it is still hot.’

Another traveller in England, M. Grosley, wrote the following about the abundant amount of toast in A Tour to London from 1772:
‘The butter and tea which the Londoners live upon from morning until three or four in the afternoon, occasions the chief consumption of bread, which is cut in slices, and so thin, that it does as much honour to the address of the person that cuts it, as to the sharpness of the knife.’

Toast is usually toasted in a toaster today, but a slice of bread can also be sandwiched between two wire frames and toasted on the hob of British traditional stoves such as Esse and Aga. There is really no toast like it – crunchy outside and soft within, especially when the cooker is still running on coals like in the little B&B where we like to stay near Stonehenge.

A much richer version is fried toast, deep-fried or fried in large quantities of butter or lard in a frying pan. This version is reserved for fry-ups (English breakfast) on special occasions when the extra calories and fat are not counted. However, there is a decline in the fried toast that was never missing from a breakfast plate when my parents and I travelled around Britain when I was a child. Fry-ups have become more health conscious, organic at times, with toast no longer immersed in fat, and bacon and sausages coming from happy pigs.

In the Evening Telegraph of 1937 an advertisement appeared to popularise toast:
‘Eat toasted bread for energy.’

Toast can indeed strengthen someone and offer comfort. Heartache and other dramas are also solved by serving the tormented soul a plate of toast and bottomless cups of milky tea with sugar. The British believe that an extra spoonful of sugar in tea is needed to calm the nerves.

Tea is restorative, my English friends have all said more than once – there’s nothing a cup of tea can’t fix. The first thing offered to you when you come out of surgery in Britain is tea and toast. While in the rest of Europe small children receive a biscuit to chew on, British children are given a slice of toast. Many children get toast with jam as a snack when they return home from school in the afternoon. It is no exaggeration to state that the British are born with a slice of toast in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. For the British, toast is part of their identity.