My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
When the days grow dark by four, and frost creeps across the windows in the kitchen, my thoughts turn to toast. When I was a nanny, my boss and I spent long hours sipping scalding hot mugs of tea, and piling everything we could find onto thick slices of toast. We went through jars of marmalade so numerous I could barely keep up with demand, and spread butter thickly onto each small crust left on our plates. Nowadays, more frequently than I like to admit, my housemate will whip up his ‘Tom Jacob special’: a slice of toast spread with butter, Marmite, and peanut butter, and then topped with (stay with me) sauerkraut and Tabasco sauce. We’ll make a pot of tea, and take a small break from our work. It is indecently good. It’s also perhaps evidence that you could put pretty much anything on toast and I’d wax lyrical about it.
Toast crops up so frequently in English stories that it has become a shorthand for familiarity and safety: Gandalf eats ‘two whole loaves (with masses of butter…)’ for breakfast in The Hobbit; Alice is reassured when she tastes hot buttered toast in the potion labeled ‘Drink Me’; and Mary Poppins smells of white linen and toast. Sara and Becky toast muffins over the attic fire in A Little Princess, and the Baudelaire orphans remember burning toast when making breakfast for their parents in the first of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The daily reliability of buttered toast in The Woman in White seems entirely natural; I can’t imagine any other food being enjoyed with such regularity.
There is nothing that comforts and reassures quite like toast. Though his strident conservatism and anthropomorphic animals don’t do much for me, Kenneth Grahame (and, through him, Toad) truly understood the glory of toast, spread thickly with butter. His words in The Wind in the Willows have stayed with me since I first read them, close to twenty-five years ago: buttered toast speaks of ‘warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender…’