Toast...
...hot or cold
Toast has to be made, like tea, in a very particular way for most people. Italians don’t really eat toast in the way English people do (in my experience). I may be 100% biologically Italian but where toast is concerned, I’m totally English.
My parents used to run a cafe on London’s Bayswater Road. My dad would make me toast that was golden brown and dripping in butter, some of it soaked in, some in still visible puddles. But I realised that what I really like about toast is not quite how much it’s toasted but how hot or cold it is.
When I’m under the weather, I ask my husband to make me ‘hospital toast’ which brings me back to when I had my first daughter and in recovery, (I had an emergency C-section) a kindly nurse brought me tea and toast - white ‘supermarket bread', barely bronzed, the butter deeply soaked in. It was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, plus she said, she shouldn’t really have made it for me in case I was sick. It’s still what I ask for after a bug.
At home I make all our bread but the toast has to be cold before any topping is introduced to it. Hot toast makes me feel claustrophobic.
I saw a survey once that said if you like your toast cold you were posh as it was a sign that you were brought up with staff - the idea being that by the time the toast was brought up from the kitchens by the butler, the toast was cold.
Readers, this is not an accurate representation of my upbringing.
How do you like your toast?
I’m a pleb from the deepest, darkest Eastern Europe so I like it hot, not cold, on the rare occasion when I eat it - we never buy sliced bread, which IMHO is the only acceptable bread to use. Though as you say, it’s really an English thing, at least for my generation. Nobody owned a toaster when I was growing up in Poland under communism, though my mother made what’s known here as French toast as a treat sometimes, to use up stale white sourdough (shop bought). But my English husband toasts every kind of bread: homemade sourdough, multiseed sourdough from a bakery - he’d probably try and toast Danish rugbrød.
Cold so that you can spread it with what the Danes call "tooth butter". Toast cooled by leaning two pieces together (don't have my parents' old stainless steel modern toast rack and they are not something generally made these days). But crumpets should be hot with melted butter. And the white supermarket bread toast needs to be with marge, I think, in memory of staying in a schoolfriend's parents' hotel in Yarmouth.