I love the smell (to misquote Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now) of toast in the mornings...or indeed at any time. Sourdough or granary, slices of day old brioche, baguette or ciabatta, muffins, crumpets and teacakes, bagels, hot cross buns, Cornish saffron buns, Arabic flat breads and Indian nans....there's nothing I wont put in a toaster or under the grill. There's something about the application of heat and a little light charring to bread that creates a whole new set of aromas and flavours, even to the dullest bit of white sliced - not that such a thing is ever found in my house. And, I've discovered, there is a proper name for the process by which we create toast - the Maillard reaction, of which more later. I'm musing on toast because I've just bought a new toaster after the last one finally gave up following four years of hard labour. It's not a fancy designer toaster, where form comes before function, but a fairly average Tefal job, the updated model of the last one, which worked perfectly well.
But it did make me think, while perusing the vast range of toasters on sale, that the British appear to be the world leaders in toast and, indeed, it was a British firm, Crompton & Company, that made the first electric toaster in 1893. Much as they love their bread in France, Spain and Italy, toasters are not quite a fixture of every kitchen and toast not so important as it is in this country, with our traditions of tea cakes and sweet breads of all kinds. If the French want to toast something, they bung it under the grill. The Italians of course created the paninni, which seems to have spread like wildfire to every corner cafe, but I dont think they are quite the same thing at all. There is something very English and comforting about our toast tradition - think of toasting crumpets on a fork in front of an open fire, a pot of tea and Gentlemen's relish to hand at about five pm on a winter's evening, or hot buttered toast and Marmite (actually, I'm a Vegemite convert, but thats for a later posting) at breakfast and toasted Saffron buns and hot chocolate after a walk along the Cornish cliffs. No wonder Nigel Slater entitled his wonderful and evocative childhood food memoir Toast, no wonder that in Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graeme uses images of golden globules of melting butter on hot toast, to evoke a sense of home and fireside to a homesick Mole.
I learnt about Cromptons and the Maillard reaction from a fascinating article on a website called American Heritage. It told me, obviously, that it was Americans who actually made the toaster what it is today. More interestingly, the article says that infrared radiation is the key to making toast. "Direct heating of bread to at least 310 degrees Fahrenheit triggers what food chemists call the Maillard reaction, in which sugars and amino acids in the bread react to form numerous flavorful compounds responsible for the change in the bread’s taste, color, and aroma. The Maillard reaction also reduces the bread’s water content by about two-thirds, making the toast crunchy.''
You can read the full piece here http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2005/2/2005_2_6.shtml.
But to me, it will never be about creating a Maillard reaction. For me, toast is about something far more elemental than mere scientific formula.