Toast

There's a toaster in the kitchen!  A real one, as opposed to a toaster oven.  I dislike toaster ovens (for making toast, anyway).  My parents would have loved the dried-out, crispy product, but not I.  One should be able to bite a piece off, not break it.

Toasting has come a long way, but my taste in toasters stopped developing as soon as one came along that popped up by itself.  Some of you might think that is the very minimum a toaster should do, but I got nooze.

Toasters had several forms,back in the day.  They didn't pop up.  You had to monitor the process and rescue the toast before it actually caught fire.  I remember something like the early electric ones in the top row, as a kid in England.  The bottom left is what we had when I was a teen in Canada.  However, when Mom and I visited her relatives in Ontario in 1955, this is what Aunt Grace had:

It sat over a burner on the stove.  You had to really watch that one!

Backtracking to England, when we stayed at Granny's house (called The Slinget) in Herefordshire, there were no such new-fangled gadgets.  This is what served:

It wasn't always used over an open fire...Granny did have a cook-stove.  However, Aunt Zoë (notoriously a bad cook) was usually assigned to make the toast, and usually managed to burn it, even though the other end of the fork was in her hand.  As the BBC was usually on and playing classical music, I have issues.  Some of my friends have heard me refer to certain pieces of classical music as "burnt toast music."  My memory is a wonderful thing, and forever associates the smell of burnt toast with the music that was playing at the time.

I had a lovely breakfast this morning...buttered toast with Marmite!