Joe Bennett: It's toast and that's all there is to say

Crunch is one part of peak toast. The other part is butter. Photo / 123rf

OPINION:

As the astute reader may already have guessed having scanned the catalogue of misery that is both the local and the international section of this newspaper, today's subject is toast. Literal toast.

Not the metaphorical stuff that our species and the planet are supposed to be, but the stuff itself, the comestible, toast. For I have just eaten two slices.

Toast needs to be toasted, by which I mean fully cooked, browned, materially altered from the bread it begins as.

Pallid toast is failed toast, is not toast. My own toaster does white bread nicely. Up it pops the colour of a lion's pelt. But feed this toaster, as I did this morning, wholemeal bread - to be precise Burgen's Soy and Linseed Sandwich Slice (I'll come to that) - which is denser than your standard white, and moister, and even though you turn the dial to max it pops up still too breadish.

So down it goes again for a second blast of radiant heat and then I gauge by smell when it is done. I do not want it charred, but dark and crispy, bread with crunch for sensory pleasure.

That crunch is ephemeral. Let the toast cool and it wanes. Let it cool more and the toast becomes deserving of the epithet that is applied, as far as I am aware, to toast and toast alone - leathery. And even youngsters brought up with synthetics will recognise the absolute precision of the word.

Leathery toast is still toast but it is not peak toast. Peak toast is eaten within a minute of leaving the toaster and it retains a crunch both textural and audible. Which is why I favour sandwich slice. The thinner bread, when rightly judged, has crunch that goes right through from one side to the other.

So crunch is one part of peak toast. The other part is butter. Indeed I would argue that unbuttered toast is effectively not toast. It's twice cooked bread. Only when the butter is applied does it become the thing we picture in our minds and savour in the imagination when we hear the word toast. And what a thing that is.

Marmalade - that sweet and bitter loveliness. Photo / 123rf

Hot buttered toast is a sensual phrase, is verbal porn. It excites and arouses. I am willing to bet that of the several million reading this column right now at least a hundred thousand will have stopped at the words hot buttered toast, put the newspaper aside and gone to the kitchen to make some. Gone like automata. Impelled by a primal drive. For hot buttered toast is a fundamental good.

My mother always put a knob of butter on the side of her side plate and buttered her toast from it bite by bite.
I believe she'd been taught this was genteel. But it is also practical. For if you butter a whole hot slice as thickly as is proper, you meet the problem of buttermelt, the oiled fingers, the glassy chin, the carpet drip.

Whereas if you butter as you go the butter only hints at melting and in the mouth the combination of hint-melt, toast crunch and wordless butter richness turns a day of living into a day worth living.

How much butter? An abundance is the only answer, a golden smear that utterly conceals the toast from view, toothmarkable in thickness. And it has to be butter.

All alternatives, all margarines and spreads and olive-oil confections, are just fakes aspiring to, but failing to achieve, the qualities that butter has and butter alone.

What are the anti-butteristas scared of? Death? Oh sorry souls. A butterless life is a sad one. And being sad won't let you off the grave. So butter your toast, come one, come all, and live.

But if you have two slices, as I did just now, both can't be eaten on the instant. While one is going down with nothing on its face but butter, the other one, perforce, is left to cool a little.

In doing so it changes to a slightly different beast, no longer hot enough to melt the butter and thus a candidate for butter plus, for something to enhance the naked luxury of buttered toast.

Two things will serve and only two. One is the salt and bitter oddity of Marmite, smeared black upon the butter. The other is the sweet and bitter loveliness of marmalade. Each done right is consolation in a spiky world. Each is as good. That's all there is to say. Toast.