Putty in their hands
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy." Marcel Proust
This is a first recipe and the book is Toast: the story of a boy's hunger, by Nigel Slater - his memoir about his childhood and youth. So not really a recipe book, but rather than disregard it I checked the first short piece - it is really a collection of chronologically arranged pieces - and I thought it was so wonderful really that I would go with it. The piece is called Toast 1 and it's about burnt toast and a mother's love.
The book has been hugely successful, made into a film with Freddie Highmore and Helena Bonham-Carter, as well as being a stage play played here and there. He wrote it back in 2003 and it has been reprinted several times since. This is the cover of my copy which was given to me by my friend Monika. Such a wonderful photo of a very young child not quite believing where he is as he sits at a linen covered table in a respectable restaurant.
And yet his childhood was not happy. His beloved mother died when he was just nine; his father was a bully who remarried, and Nigel's relationship with his stepmother was less than perfect, although her cooking experiments did influence him in strange ways but significant ways.
But I'm not about to go into all the details of Nigel's early life.
No - I'm just going to look at the subject of burnt toast - something that made Nigel come up with the words that I have used for my post title today.
They are the last words of the piece in question. The first are: "My mother is scraping a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window" continuing shortly after with "My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning. ... I am nine now, and have never seen butter without black bits in it."
I also remember a lot of burnt toast. Well toasters were not as efficient back then, and besides our toast was sometimes cooked under the grill of our gas stove - or occasionally - for a treat - before the small coal fire with the piece of bread precariously held by the prongs of a toasting fork. This picture is of a wood fire. Ours was a coal - or later coke - fuelled fire.
We too used to scrape off the burnt bits around the edges of the toast we had at home - sometimes more than the edge. Frugality prevented us from just throwning the burnt toast in the bin. And somehow it always gave me the creeps seeing all those little specks of charcoal in the sink. I found it absolutely repugnant - something I have more or less overcome, possibly because 'charred' has replaced the word 'burnt' in the food lover's vocabulary these days - and charred - particularly if in stripes is fashionable. In fact these days I actually prefer toast that is indeed just beginning to char.
Which brings me to an article that I found in, of all places - Linkedin - by somebody called Sonia Bhatanagar, who provided my opening photograph. She was really talking about appreciating those discarded attempts at writing but using the metaphor of toast - burnt toast and scraping off the burnt bits:
"I thought of all the ideas that don’t look right on paper, on the editing table, the ones we scrape away at, trying to make them look more acceptable. And when that doesn't work, there’s always the trash can. The ultimate hiding place.
Instead of just letting them be. Letting them make us a little uncomfortable. Smelling odd, looking odd, sounding odd… Who’s to say, what could happen if we stopped scraping and gave these unacceptable looking creatures a chance." Sonia Bhatnagar/Linkedin
And so one day she made herself literally eat the burnt toast:
"When I did bite into my dark knight of toasts, it was a revelation, as revelations are meant to be. A slow revealing of true character.
Thus happened my first unabashed, fearless, biting into burnt toast. And I loved it. I loved the odd taste, the smell, the whole experience of taking a risk and sticking by it."
Of course, we as children - Nigel too - were not taking a risk. We were doing as we were told, and therefore not necessarily enjoying it. Maybe if one chooses to do something however much we might not really want to - we are much more likely to appreciate it. Or at least feel good, maybe even proud, that we had done it. As children we were just avoiding punishment - however mild that might be.
But back to burnt toast. I also accidentally came across an article on Toast from Neil Buttery of British Food: a History (and earlier of Neil Cooks Grigson) in which he describes his idea of perfect toast:
"Proper toast requires proper bread; bread that has gone a slightly stale. Perfect toast is in the eye of the beholder: thick, thin, crisp throughout, soft in the centre, pale, dark, a scraping of butter or lashings of it." Neil Buttery/British Food: a History
Nigel on the other hand adds the dimension of a mother's love - well anyone who makes toast for you - in his final description of his mother's toast:
"It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People's failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten. Putty in their hands."
His next piece on Christmas cake begins with the words: "Mum never was much of a cook. Meals arrived on the table as much by happy accident as by domestic science" but through his amusing descriptions of the whole Christmas process what one is left with is warmth and love for his mother. I guess the whole book is an autobiography of his younger self, through the world of food. Of course he is a professional writer and creator of recipes, and so food is his focus, but probably if we all search our memories of home and family many of those memories will be centred on food. Many of our memories in fact. Or is that just me?
And the other lesson is that there is something worthwhile in imperfection - even in disaster - if only not to do that again. And imperfection - like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
"Were all our creations meant to look a certain way? Wasn’t that, just conditioning? " Sonia Bhatanagar/Linkedin
Hence the fashionability of 'charred'.
AND
Thank you Wendy for the Korean scrambled eggs and tomatoes. Ottolenghi - eat your heart out.
YEARS GONE BY
September 20
2024 - Collectors and/or creators
2023 - Cabbage rolls from long ago
2022 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Spring
2016 - Nothing
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