Toast

Toast is the buzzword in our house these days. The mere mention of the promise of it and I can bribe The Boys to do anything. The Musician is eating his breakfast at the pace of a snail (no, this is good: it was the pace of a dead snail until he discovered the joy of toast). They are even forgetting the sack of Christmas sweeties, favouring toast. Good. They like it with chocolate spread. Bad??

I stood in the supermarket last Wednesday, contemplating whether to buy a half or a full loaf of bread. This is one of the choices you can be sure of in the Netherlands unless you manage to time our visit with when the bread section is empty, at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon.

I have tended to buy full loaves only to have to hurriedly squash half in our already overloaded freezer, two days after purchase, or find it is too late and the languishing loaf is turning interesting shades of green. I then console myself that it will disintegrate into not too much as I assign it to the bin as its first stop on the way to a landfill site.

Such concerns were going through my head (not that quickly, I must confess: no doubt the security camera was trained on me again as I made my unnaturally long deliberations), standing in the bread section. As it was a Wednesday and the bread famine of Saturday afternoons was not yet upon us, I chose the half loaf.

That was the day The Lawyer chose to fully recover from his flu and consume six slices of toast... He now seems to be dreaming of toast and panics if he goes to bed and has not eaten what he judges as sufficient.

I have tended to think of toast as a curiously British institution. However, toasters are easy to come by in NL and a quick look on amazon.com tells me that toasters are also sought after in US. An Israeli friend of mine also commented that toast is addictive. On the one hand, I was interested that toast has international appeal. But on the other hand, I started to panic that The Lawyer (and probably The Musician) is showing addictive tendencies.

On my sojourn into Amazon, I was much amused that a company called Back to Basics should have in its range the 'TEM500 Egg-and-Muffin 2-Slice Toaster and Egg Poacher'.

Finally, some trivia. According to www.h2g2.com, a BBC owned website (so it has to be true), toast derives from the Latin word tostum, meaning scorch or burn, and it is likely that toast was brought to Britain by the Romans. The poor Roman mothers didn't have automatic toasters, though. A version of sorts arrived in 1893 with the Crompton toaster (www.toaster.org/1900.php), which was a British invention... of course!