Start with the bread. Mine is nearly always frozen, a trick I learned from a newspaper article, that sliced bread can be preserved in a freezer for weeks or months, then popped out, straight to the toaster, and come out tasting near perfect. So, bread lowered, button depressed. Time to wait. Be patient. Try to be patient. Ours is a pop-up toaster, rounded at the corners, silver and black, doesn’t matter, it’s a toaster, it’s beautiful for performing a single function. Radiant heat now expressed from the coils. The air around the bread, in the orange dark, oscillating. Meanwhile, the bread browns, the surface firms up, aroma spreads through the room. It’s arguable that the smell of toast is better than the taste of toast (toast alone wants contrast, condiments) but that forgets the extraordinary crunchy mechanical experience of eating toast, when you bite into a piece and chew, and all the burnt ridges, the uncooked crannies, rupture and soften and become the satisfying whole that’s rushing straight to your brain.
The surprising thing about toast is that it’s still difficult to buy premade. A bakery does not put toasted bread in the window. Grocery stores don’t sell loaves of toast in bags. (Melba toast doesn’t count.) Toast results, on some emotional level, I think, from a desire for the mechanical phenomenon. For me, it’s a piece of morning, dawn, time for small transformations. Beans into coffee. Bread into toast. Skim the newspapers, the calendar, make some sense of the day. Toast says, I’ll do it again, let’s see what happens this time.
What is this? A weekly newsletter by Rosecrans Baldwin consisting of (very) short essays about beautiful things. Any books mentioned can be found in a Bookshop list. Rosecrans’s next book, Everything Now, is available for preorder.
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