This is the right way to eat toast – according to an etiquette expert

Telegraph

a day ago

There's not a lot we can all agree on in this vexing and violent world but surely one thing is the inherent decency of toast. The quintessential form of comfort food, a convenient grab-and-go breakfast and, when served with smashed avocado, a brunch so moreish and aspirational that it denied an entire generation the chance to own a property.
In fact, not to overstate things, but the very history of civilisation was served with a slice of toast. The word itself is derived from the Latin tostum or torrere, meaning to burn or to scorch. But it wasn't just the Romans who warmed bread before an open flame. In ancient Egypt, stale bread was toasted to make it more palatable and long-lasting and it's said the pyramids were built on stomachs nourished with toasted flatbreads.
Here in the UK, toast is especially important, a cultural barometer in our shared history. It tells us about class, identity, money, technology. When British society changes, our taste in toast changes with it. How you take yours reveals a lot about who you are and where you come from. Warm or cold? White or brown? Butter or marg? Triangles or squares? Crusts: on or off?
However, it seems some toast traditions have held firm; in a recent Letter to the Editor, Telegraph reader Bryony Hill from Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, made the point that television period dramas – ostensibly Outrageous, the most recent retelling of the Mitford Sisters' lives – failed to adhere to how the upper classes consume toast.
Indeed, so intrigued were we to understand the polite way to consume this breakfast item, we called on etiquette coach William Hanson to offer a gentle guide: 'You're probably eating your toast completely incorrectly,' he concedes.
First is the question of the bread itself. 'To make proper toast, you should have stale bread and therefore you need to have proper bread,' says Dr Neil Buttery – his real name, I swear it – host of the British Food History podcast. The problem with today's highly processed, long-lasting loaves, he says, is that they have too much water in them. 'It goes mouldy before it goes stale.'
Buy something fresh from the baker and give it a day or two before you put it in the toaster – or the grill, as Delia Smith still prefers. Then consider how you cut your toast and present it at the table.
''Posh' toast is often square and has the crusts removed in the kitchen,' explains Hanson. 'Middle-class toast is triangular, and 'common' toast is rectangular – both with the crusts left intact.'
Once the shape is decided, then comes the act of preparation.
'What a lot of people seem to do with their toast is they slather the butter, jam, the marmalade, whatever they're having, and eat it all in one go, perhaps in a rush,' he surmises, having clearly been witness to a weekday breakfast in a bog-standard British household once or twice in his life. 'Instead, the slightly more sophisticated way to eat toast is to slow it right down and do it just like a bread roll with butter, chunk by chunk.'
More on what comes next later, but it's gratifying to know that this level of precision has been applied to toast for many years.
'To set but a low value upon toast is to expose one's deficiencies in right appreciation,' wrote the humorist EV Lucas in his 1906 essay A Word On Toast. The essay reveals that the British have been arguing about toast for at least 120 years. In it, Lucas takes issue with an earlier piece in The Spectator, published 30 years prior.
'True toast,' it had written, 'is classical — severe… Toast, we need not say, should be thin, crisp, wafer-like, as well as embrowned, fresh and hot. Thick toast with solid fleshy bread between the embrowned surfaces is a gross and plebeian solecism; for the true intention of toast, its meaning or raison d'etre, is to extinguish the foody, solid taste which belongs to bread, and to supply in its place crisp, light, fragrant, evanescent, spiritualised chips of fare, the mere scent and sound of which suggest the crisp, pleasant, light chat of easy morning or evening conversation.'
Perhaps you can tell, but around this time, in the Victorian era, toast had become a signifier of civility. Good bread meant well-bred. With the invention of the electric toaster still decades in the future, toast was prepared with an open flame, a small toasting fork and no small amount of skill. Lucas writes that men prized their ability to toast bread in much the same way that modern men boast of their skills at the barbecue.
'I've had a go myself and it is really quite difficult,' says Buttery. 'You have to dry the bread out completely all the way through to have even, golden sides.'
In the great houses of Britain, this was often done by the staff, of course, presented at the table in silver toast racks, alongside butter knives, marmalade spoons and other trappings of genteel living. And it's at these grand breakfast tables where notions of toast etiquette emerged.
To eat toast in the proper manner, says Hanson, certain equipment is needed. A toast rack to prevent sogginess, several items of cutlery to prevent cross-contamination and naturally, a plate. We're not savages, after all.
He then goes on to illustrate how the toast and individual portions of butter and condiment are to be placed on the plate – crucially with separate cutlery – before anything else can take place.
'Now we get on to the fun bit of adding the butter and the jam onto the piece of toast,' he explains, adding that there are two ways of doing this. 'Using a clean knife, we can either just do a little portion and place some jam on top, pick it up and then eat. Or, just like a bread roll, we can break a small bite-sized piece off and then add the butter and the jam.'
According to Buttery, this breaking of bread in the hand rather than the mouth is an edict that goes back centuries. 'It's bad manners to bite into some bread or toast and show your teeth. It goes back to the Middle Ages and maybe even further, but you certainly see it in all sorts of etiquette guides from the 18th and 19th century. Never bare your teeth. I guess it's just a bit animalistic.'
If that's the case, perhaps we're all animals now. The first electric toaster was invented in 1893, although pop-up styles that toast multiple pieces of bread concurrently were not commonplace until at least the 1950s. With mass production came (literally) sloppy standards.
Toast drenched in butter or margarine (more likely as the decades went by) was a staple of 20th-century school canteens and greasy-spoon cafes. 'As a kid, we'd have to have Stork margarine on our toast,' Buttery says. 'But my mum kept the butter on the top shelf where only she could reach it. Butter was always considered quite an upper-class thing.'
Beans on toast apparently became a popular dish after Heinz marketed it as such in the 1920s, although the rationing of the Second World War cemented its status on our collective breakfast menu. But this only soggied our toast even further.
'The noise from toast should reverberate in the head like the thunder of July,' Lucas wrote back in 1906. Perhaps that's something we can all agree on: we need to get our bite back.