The Maillard reaction plays a huge part in all our lives, more than we can imagine. It’s what we have to thank for giving us steaks, fried onions, French fries, condensed milk, coffee, maple syrup and various other foods with wonderful flavours. And toast. Who can refuse a piece of browned, crisp toast with a knob of rapidly melting butter, maybe topped with a sunny-side-up, bacon and fries? Or drizzled with honey and fruits? Or topped with a masala omelette perhaps? Whatever the topping, a piece of toast is arguably one of the most versatile foods, along with rice and potato. And it looks great on Instagram too.
From vegetable masala sandwich and bread omelette on train journeys to artisanal toast — high-quality, crisped-up bread (usually on a cast-iron skillet) topped with anything from almond butter to sliced avocados and feta — started in San Francisco, the humble piece of bread is now a fancy hipster treat. If you’ve seen the 2014 movie Chef , there’s a scene where Jon Favreau makes a mean grilled cheese: first, he lovingly slathers butter on two slices of white bread, then oils a grill and slaps the pieces on it and moves them around for a while before adding a pile of different cheese slices on each. After a side has browned, Jon lifts a piece with a spatula, flips it on top of the other, adds some more butter on top, browns it a little further before serving up. This is toast at its indulgent best.
Artisanal toast is not the first of our food obsessions — cupcakes, quinoa, chia, amaranth — and neither will it be the last. New York-based chef Jill Donenfeld, founder of The Culinistas, a boutique catering service, in her latest book Better On Toast celebrates just that — whether it’s thick-cut French bread, slices of whole wheat, or gluten-free bread — with quick, easy recipes with toppings from savoury to sweet. But does this book only celebrate a growing trend in the West? Jill believes the opposite, “It’s completely popular and universal and is the simplest dish that does not alienate anyone,” she says, and adds, “Before it was a trend, I was always putting my food on bread as a satisfying and easy delivery system.”
Just how satisfying is toast as a meal? Look no further than the streets of Mumbai and Chennai, particularly Montieth Road here, where Sree Balaji Sandwich Stall has a dedicated following, especially the bread omelette masala toast. The key ingredient in these sandwiches is spicy green chutney made of coriander that is generously spread on both sides; while it’s no artisanal sandwich, it is tasty and easy on the pocket. Bombaysthan (Vadapalani, Kilpauk, Greams Road, T. Nagar) serves up a smashing bread butter jam grill, Spoonbill (Alwarpet) has a plate of creamy corn on toast and Sandy’s Chocolate Laboratory’s French Toast (Nungambakkam) with maple syrup can make anyone fall in love with toast. Then there’s Royal Sandwich Shop which offers basic varieties like butter-jam toast, masala toast, boiled egg toast to eccentric ones such as chocolate banana dates cheese, bread omelette Maggi cheese toast and even a gobi vadakari cheese toast. Talk about whacky experiments.
But as whacky as it is here, the British take it seriously (as a snack or a proper meal) with butter, jam and tea, baked beans and, as culinary goddess Nigella Lawson so frequently proclaims, with the popular spread Marmite. A quintessential British snack, as The Guardian puts it, their ‘How to eat’ series examines the right way to consume toast. It’s not simple, they say, and the right piece of toast depends on a number of variables, from the type of bread to the fat used, right down to the way it’s toasted.
And if you think an electric toaster is the way to go, boy are you wrong! Jamie Oliver reportedly likes his on a frying pan and squashed flat. Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast appropriately begins with burnt toast.
It’s not just chefs who wax poetic about toast. In King Lear , the Bard writes, “Peace, peace; this piece of toasted cheese will do’t,” — here King Lear calls for toasted cheese to tempt an imagined mouse. Toast also finds a mention in Henry V . While Gwyneth Paltrow is undoubtedly the patron saint of avocado toast — her cookbook It’s All Good makes a mention of vegan avocado toast — the dish also finds a fan in Jill, who says she’ll “never tire of it”.
A piece of toast might have gone to places and transformed into different avatars, but arguably one of the most inviting descriptions is found in a passage from The Wind in The Willows : “When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb.”
And that is what toast is all about — good old comfort food.
