Like good music or beautiful words . . .

"The noise from good toast should reverberate in the head like the thunder of July."
- E. V. Lucas

Returning to bread, as I mentioned in the last post, my first loaves of sourdough have been drawn from the oven and I now have enough bread to last me through a prolonged siege. It’s kind of ridiculous.  The last batch of starter was more soupy than normal so I ended up adding mounds of whole wheat flour to achieve the right consistency of dough—soft and very slightly sticky.  Even so, perhaps I got impatient and failed to add quite enough flour because the resulting loaves, while wonderfully flavorsome, were slightly too dense and not as voluminous as I’d hoped. Still, it is virtually impossible to achieve a light loaf with only rye and whole wheat flours; these lend themselves to a hearty, earthen loaf instead.

Despite my love of a northern, nut-brown bread, I know that after chomping through a couple kilos of this stuff I’m going to be craving something lighter. So next batch I’m moving on to a mixed, granary style loaf.

Yesterday I had some sourdough for breakfast. As it warmed and caramelized in the toaster, that familiar, inebriating aroma filled the kitchen.  What is it about the smell of toast that is so evocative? Is it merely the bodily recollection—as with many foods—of childhood? And yet there seems something altogether more powerful at work when it comes to toasting bread.

Curious, I scanned the web for leads on these phenomenon and came across an interesting BBC story on the subject (it makes sense that Brits would be particularly attached to toast as it is an all-pervasive part of their breakfast table). "Toast brings out the child in us," say Cardiff experts

Whether chemistry, memory, or other factor is at work, I admit to an undying love of toast, specifically toasted brown bread topped with butter and either marmalade, marmite, or a potent homemade jam.  As the interviewees mentioned, it is warming and comforting to eat.  And then there is that gratifying crunch that E. V. Lucas so wonderfully describes.  Like good music or beautiful words, toast is nothing less than existentially nourishing.