Toast

Do you take toast for granted? I bet you do. I did, until late September. Toast, who thinks about it – it’s something that’s always there, a convenient snack, a boring backup. I enjoyed toast, I liked toast, but when it came to my personal food hierarchy there were always more interesting, exotic foodstuffs ahead of it: lemon stuffed green olives marinated in garlic and olive oil, perhaps, or mangoes, or squidgy ripe brie.

And then I came to China and looked in the supermarket: no toasters. I looked in the WalMart in Beijing: no toasters. I have come to the conclusion that whilst many of the toasters happily browning bread in the West are made in China, none are actually used here.

In desperation, one of my friends attempted to toast a slice of bread above the vicious hot plates that are our cooking equipment, and merely succeeded in setting fire to the bread, a conflagration that nearly spread to her drying clothes. Some of us have been known to order youth hostel breakfasts solely for the toast, and I admit that my wrath, when I found a ‘western’ breakfast in a Shanghai hostel came with disgusting sweet Chinese bread, may have been considered slightly disproportional by some. Digressing slightly, the same hostel had tried to pass instant noodles off as pasta in the abortion that had passed for ‘spaghetti bolognaise’ the night before.

I now find myself thinking about toast in the way I’d previously harboured teenage crushes, with furtive, sensual thoughts intruding at the most peculiar times.

I think about thick, white, lightly toasted slices, slathered in butter and consumed with a cup of tea (with milk, something else I’m deprived of here), whilst reading a book or chatting with my mother in the kitchen.

I think about a crisper slice, topped with a lightly fried egg: the satisfying moment of cutting into the yolk, and the rich, slightly soggy mouthfuls of eggy-breadiness, and finally the last speared scrap of toast mopping up the remaining yolky smears.

I think about the two slices of toast, one coated in raspberry jam, the other in apricot, that form one of my few acceptable breakfasts. Yeah, I know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, yadda, yadda, but bite me: I just don’t like it.

I think about smothering a slice with an over generous helping of good quality pâté. The bread is an important ingredient here, it needs to be a bland base for the pâté, but robust and solid enough to act as a complement to it, unlike the flavourless mush of supermarket pap.

I think, as of a dear friend, of toasted cheese, and the art of making the perfect portion. How much should it be pre-toasted, the cheese-to-bread ratio, the narrow margin between still raw cheese and a cremated remain, the additions that devotees of the cult experiment with: a under layer of Marmite, a sprinkling of Tabasco or Worcestershire sauce on the cheese, a side of sweet chilli sauce or piccalilli. Most of all though, I miss the succulent mixture of melt and crisp, the range of flavours when you use good bread and cheese, the satisfying completeness of it.

I’m home in 14 weeks: make sure the toaster’s working.