Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And uh, you know this episode is titled
Speaker 1: Bread Toast Toasters because we're going to take you on
Speaker 1: an odyssey of human invention. Oh. I never thought about
Speaker 1: this as an odyssey, but it really is one spanning generations.
Speaker 1: It's like two thousand one of space Odyssey, it is.
Speaker 1: But of course the middle part of that is toast.
Speaker 1: So I just wanted to take a second for us
Speaker 1: artist to consider the slice of toast a thing that,
Speaker 1: when done right, is absolutely exquisite in its own right,
Speaker 1: but also serves as an excellent base for so many
Speaker 1: other fine taste sensations. Wouldn't you agree? Oh? I absolutely would.
Speaker 1: I there is a food combination that I don't know
Speaker 1: if it can be topped. It might especially be a
Speaker 1: Southeast United States kind of thing. But we're in tomato
Speaker 1: season right now, you know, it's July, especially getting in
Speaker 1: to August. That's like peak tomato season. And I just
Speaker 1: want to say, as a message to you young folks
Speaker 1: out there, if if you have never tried like a
Speaker 1: delicious like thick, juicy, vine ripened you know, farmers or
Speaker 1: garden tomato. You've only had tomatoes from the grocery store.
Speaker 1: You do not understand what a tomato tastes like like.
Speaker 1: It is not just better to get a good from
Speaker 1: you know, summer tomato from a farmer or a garden.
Speaker 1: It's a completely different food, yea. And sometimes it looks
Speaker 1: like a different different species altogether, you know, because it
Speaker 1: will be like an organic tomato you've had a farmer's
Speaker 1: market will sometimes be kind of like weirdly grotesquely bloated
Speaker 1: looking and have lines on it. It's not as pristine
Speaker 1: as your you know, your grocery store tomato, but that
Speaker 1: the taste experiences is beyond yes. And so if you
Speaker 1: want to have the most perfect tomato experience, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of ways people do it. People make a
Speaker 1: crazy salad it or just eat it, you know, sliced
Speaker 1: with salt and pepper or something like that. But here
Speaker 1: here's something i'd recommend. Get some good bread, toast the bread,
Speaker 1: you know, lightly toasted, a little bit of mayonnaise, and
Speaker 1: fresh sliced summer tomatoes. That is the best meal you
Speaker 1: will ever have in your entire life. Oh, I believe it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've we've been doing a lot of these. We don't
Speaker 1: do bacon anymore, but we've basically been doing b lts,
Speaker 1: but with sausage standing in for the bacon. And it's
Speaker 1: but with the with really good tomatoes and it's fabulous.
Speaker 1: But even without tomatoes, I mean, think of all the
Speaker 1: things that toast is great with. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: put some marmalade, some butter on toast and that's a
Speaker 1: home run. Avocado toast has been a huge hit in
Speaker 1: recent years, and because for a great reason it is wonderful.
Speaker 1: Avocado toast is basically just another form of buttered toast,
Speaker 1: because avocado is like fruit butter. Yeah, but it's exquisite tasting.
Speaker 1: I'm also reminded of toad in the hole of your head.
Speaker 1: Toad in the hole, you cut a hole out of
Speaker 1: the toast, you to agon it. Yeah, yeah, it's great,
Speaker 1: it's it's amazing. Yeah. So we're gonna before we get
Speaker 1: back to toast and what toast is, we should talk
Speaker 1: about what comes before toast, and eventually we'll get into
Speaker 1: what comes before that. But let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about the other great wonder one of the greatest inventions
Speaker 1: the humanity has ever devised, that being bread itself, right,
Speaker 1: and it's possible to argue that bread is one of
Speaker 1: the inventions that made human civilization. It's sort of a
Speaker 1: culinary chemistry project because it's not something you find in nature.
Speaker 1: Bread is a thing that certainly had to be invented,
Speaker 1: and it's this thing that turned the seeds of hardy
Speaker 1: grass plants into a scalable staple food that could provide
Speaker 1: lots of calories to feed settled populations and and big
Speaker 1: settled populations. And before the cultivation of grain crops, most
Speaker 1: of the time humans wouldn't be able to grow and
Speaker 1: store enough food survive in large numbers in one place.
Speaker 1: Like in settled cities, you have to keep moving around
Speaker 1: and constantly foraging for food through the hunting of animals
Speaker 1: or the gathering of wild plants. The main strain of
Speaker 1: thinking about the origins of cities and settled human population
Speaker 1: is the cultivation of grasses. Yielding grain crops massively increase
Speaker 1: the efficiency of human food production, so you can get
Speaker 1: like way more stores of ready calories with less work,
Speaker 1: and the thinking usually goes that this is also what
Speaker 1: made possible the diversifying of human labor. Since not everybody
Speaker 1: had to be involved in getting food all of the time,
Speaker 1: more people could be able to spend more of their
Speaker 1: time on other types of projects, so crafts like pottery
Speaker 1: and weaving, and the creation of tools and weapons and
Speaker 1: other technologies, the education of children, the creation of literature
Speaker 1: and music, religious rights and duties, and all these other
Speaker 1: things that we come to associate with human technology and culture.
Speaker 1: And there's st only a case to be made that
Speaker 1: cereal crops and the bread that was made with them
Speaker 1: played a huge role in making all this possible that
Speaker 1: led to the modern world. Now. As for bread itself,
Speaker 1: of course, there are a bazillion different ways to make bread, right.
Speaker 1: The most essential components, uh too. Pretty much all bread
Speaker 1: recipes are water and a flower based on some type
Speaker 1: of grain from a grass plant like wheat. So to
Speaker 1: make wheat flour, of course, you you've got to take
Speaker 1: the fruiting body of the wheat plant, which is the
Speaker 1: kernel or the seed, and the wheat plant. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you've never actually looked up close at the part
Speaker 1: of the wheat that you eat, you know wheat is
Speaker 1: a grass. It's like this huge, tall grass, and it's
Speaker 1: got this thing on the end that's got the seeds,
Speaker 1: and it looks kind of like a furry rattlesnake tail
Speaker 1: at the top of the stall. So it's got all
Speaker 1: these rattlesnake tails, and you've got to take those rattlesnake
Speaker 1: tails off, get the seeds out of them, and then
Speaker 1: process those seeds and grind them into a powder. And
Speaker 1: of course that powder is the flour. And then to
Speaker 1: turn the flour into bread, you have to hydrate it
Speaker 1: with water. And if this is like a flat or
Speaker 1: unleavened bread, you can just add any other seasonings you
Speaker 1: want and bake it as is in an oven or
Speaker 1: on a hot surface, and this will tend to produce,
Speaker 1: of course, a relatively like flat, chewy bread, like kind
Speaker 1: of like a peda or like a tortilla. But the
Speaker 1: most common type of bread we're familiar with, and the
Speaker 1: kind we think of when we're making toast, is of
Speaker 1: course bread that has some kind of leavening, which is
Speaker 1: an agent that will create gas bubbles inside the dough
Speaker 1: that cause it to rise. And these bubbles, of course
Speaker 1: increase the volume of the dough they make it rise,
Speaker 1: but they also give the bread a softer texture. And
Speaker 1: in the modern world, we've got tons of different kind
Speaker 1: of ways of getting bubbles into bread. We've got chemical
Speaker 1: agents like baking powder, baking soda, and they create gas
Speaker 1: bubbles through chemical reactions that happen after the substances are
Speaker 1: added to the dough. But you can also create a
Speaker 1: kind of forced mechanical leavening just by like incorporating something
Speaker 1: like whipped egg whites, where like the air whipped into
Speaker 1: the egg whites forms gas bulls that expand when you
Speaker 1: cook it. But of course, the more traditional method of
Speaker 1: levining is to use biological agents like yeast. And here
Speaker 1: for for listeners of invention and stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 1: we bring things back to the fungal allegiance is this
Speaker 1: is zug timoy here, Yeah, this is the Kingdom of
Speaker 1: zug awesome. Yeah, zugtimoy comes in yet again with so
Speaker 1: many of our best inventions. There's zug timoy derive. So yeast,
Speaker 1: of course, is a type of single celled fungal microorganism
Speaker 1: found all throughout nature and even in and on our
Speaker 1: own bodies. Uh. And the strain most often used today
Speaker 1: is Baker's yeast, which is the fungal species Scara micey
Speaker 1: serivsy uh So, baker's east actually also serves as the
Speaker 1: fermentation agent in the making of beer and wine. So
Speaker 1: like when yeast consume carbohydrates, the yeast produced waste products.
Speaker 1: Those waste products include C O two, which is the
Speaker 1: gas that makes bread rise. But they also include ethanol,
Speaker 1: which is alcohol, which of course that's what adds the
Speaker 1: alcohol content to beer in wine when it for mints.
Speaker 1: And I do think it's generally true that that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, bread made with yeast is alcoholic to a
Speaker 1: small extent. It's not alcoholic enough to get you drunk,
Speaker 1: but but it's but it's there, yeah, yeah, uh and
Speaker 1: is of course, there's so many cultural variations of bread
Speaker 1: all around the world, using different grains to make the flour.
Speaker 1: Like the different grains include like oats or rye, barley, millet, maize, sorghum.
Speaker 1: And you've got all the different cooking methods, different leavening agents,
Speaker 1: different seasonings. It's an entire world of cuisine. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's a good reason that you've got like
Speaker 1: cooking and baking, you know, like baking is it's not
Speaker 1: just bread, is you know, pastries and stuff too, but
Speaker 1: like this whole other sort of half of the cooking
Speaker 1: world is focused on bread like things. And is it
Speaker 1: any wonder that some of the bread like things end
Speaker 1: up taking on magical or spiritual potency be it you know,
Speaker 1: be it as part of say, uh you know Western
Speaker 1: Chris tradition of of taking holy communion or or certainly
Speaker 1: examples from aso American culture where uh where where the
Speaker 1: the use of maize in in food products, you know,
Speaker 1: and in some sort of a flatbread and all it
Speaker 1: was considered the you know, the the body of a god.
Speaker 1: It was something that you ate in silence because you
Speaker 1: were partaking of something holy. Oh wow, Well there is
Speaker 1: something mystical about bread, because I think I was hinting
Speaker 1: at this a minute ago. But you know, it's not
Speaker 1: apparent in nature. Bread is something that was truly an invention.
Speaker 1: It's not like something you discovered that was already out
Speaker 1: there waiting. Like you had to put together a bunch
Speaker 1: of different uh like steps in this process. You know,
Speaker 1: you had to get the seeds from these grasses, and
Speaker 1: you had to grind them up into powder, and you
Speaker 1: had to get that powder wet and make a dough
Speaker 1: out of it, and if it's leavened bread, you had
Speaker 1: to add some kind of leavening agent to make it
Speaker 1: rise or allow you know, natural yeast to get into it.
Speaker 1: The would let it rise, and then you had to
Speaker 1: bake it at the right temperature and all is just like,
Speaker 1: it's not something that's obvious, So you have to wonder
Speaker 1: who invented this, Like where did all this knowledge and
Speaker 1: process come from? Well, let's talk about it. Unfortunately, it's
Speaker 1: another one of those that is that is lost to history, right,
Speaker 1: there's no known inventor of bread. It's one of these
Speaker 1: great world changing inventions like the wheel that we can
Speaker 1: get some clues about, but which, you know, the the
Speaker 1: ultimate origin vanishes into prehistory with no single point from
Speaker 1: which all of it comes. But we do have some
Speaker 1: general knowledge about the origins of bread and bread like products.
Speaker 1: So for a long time, it was believed, based on
Speaker 1: artistic and archaeological evidence, that bread emerged as a human
Speaker 1: invention roughly ten thousand years ago, and this would be
Speaker 1: during the Neolithic period, meaning the last part of the
Speaker 1: Stone Age, and it would have been in a place
Speaker 1: called the Fertile Crescent now the Fertile Crescent is this
Speaker 1: sickle shaped expanse of arable land is land where you
Speaker 1: can grow crops stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean over into Mesopotamia,
Speaker 1: and so from west to east. It sort of starts
Speaker 1: down in the Nile River valley in Egypt, and then
Speaker 1: it travels up along the Eastern Mediterranean coast through like Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,
Speaker 1: and it goes up through southern Turkey, and then it
Speaker 1: goes back down through Mesopotamia through a rock in parts
Speaker 1: of Iran. And the first wheat crops that were domesticated
Speaker 1: in in the Fertile Crescent to make the earliest bread
Speaker 1: during the Neolithic Revolution would have been ancestral grasses like
Speaker 1: m air wheat which is e M M E R
Speaker 1: M R wheat or iron corn wheat. These are grasses
Speaker 1: that they are. They're basically other strains of wheat, kind
Speaker 1: of like the wheat we we grow today, which is
Speaker 1: just known as common wheat. And I think it's not
Speaker 1: a it's not a coincidence that this is where many
Speaker 1: of the world's oldest and earliest civilizations arose, meaning that
Speaker 1: even though there were people all over the world. These
Speaker 1: were the places where people first started settling down in
Speaker 1: one place, making cities with big populations and diversified economies.
Speaker 1: And these cities had to be supported by grain agriculture,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that grain was of course used
Speaker 1: to make bread and and this has sort of been
Speaker 1: the story for a long time, but really interestingly, just
Speaker 1: in the past couple of years, it's been revealed that
Speaker 1: at least some humans were making bread thousands of years
Speaker 1: before this Neolithic agricultural revolution, before all the farming in
Speaker 1: the Fertile Crescent started. So the papering question here talking
Speaker 1: about this discovery was published in P and A s
Speaker 1: in eighteen by Ammia ranzoteg we at All And uh So,
Speaker 1: basically the story goes like this. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: there's this archaeobotanist, somebody who studies ancient plants named uh
Speaker 1: Amaya iran's oteg we I hope I'm saying that right,
Speaker 1: uh And she was studying ancient human campsites in Jordan's
Speaker 1: and specifically she was looking at an excavator did cooking
Speaker 1: site from about fourteen thousand years ago, and this would
Speaker 1: have been a camp of people known as the New Tuffians,
Speaker 1: who were a culture of hunter gatherers who lived in
Speaker 1: this area in the time between the Paleolithic, the Old
Speaker 1: Stone Age, and the Neolithic. The more recent Stone Age
Speaker 1: between these two technology regimes would have been roughly four
Speaker 1: thousand years before settled agriculture started to take over, before
Speaker 1: we believed previously that humans invented bread. And then the
Speaker 1: Natufians survived on a hunter gatherer basis. They did a
Speaker 1: lot of hunting, and their fire pits and food waste
Speaker 1: sites were full of bones of wild animals that have
Speaker 1: been killed during hunts and eton But at this particular site,
Speaker 1: Aronzo teg we also found charred remains of some kind
Speaker 1: of plant matter, and so I was reading about how
Speaker 1: what she did. She took it to a colleague named
Speaker 1: Lara Gonzalez Cartero at University College London and they discovered
Speaker 1: these charred food remains were breadcrumbs. These hunter gatherers were
Speaker 1: making some form of bread thousands of years before we
Speaker 1: previously assumed bread had been invented. Now, the flower used
Speaker 1: in this ancient bread had two main ingredients. It was
Speaker 1: in corn wheat, which is again it's a wild strain
Speaker 1: of wheat grass and then it was the roots of
Speaker 1: club rush tubers, which is a type of flower um,
Speaker 1: and then it was a lot. There was some other
Speaker 1: things in there also, like some spices like mustard and
Speaker 1: other trace ingredients like barley, and the researchers think this
Speaker 1: dough would have been made to stick to the hot
Speaker 1: stone walls lining fire pits. I was reading an NPR
Speaker 1: article describing the discovery and h it compared it to
Speaker 1: the way that Indian non bread is made to stick
Speaker 1: to the walls of a tendur oven. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen how that's made. There's like, no,
Speaker 1: I've never seen this. I just always assumed it was
Speaker 1: put in their flat like a pizza. No, there's like
Speaker 1: so there's like this vertical hollow oven. It's got the
Speaker 1: you know, this fire at the bottom gets extremely hot
Speaker 1: and then it's got the walls all around the sides.
Speaker 1: And if you see the traditional way or I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's the traditional way, at least the way
Speaker 1: a lot of like Indian restaurants and Indian kitchens will
Speaker 1: make the non bread is they get the dough and
Speaker 1: the dough sort of goes on a hook and then
Speaker 1: the hook gets uh, the dough gets flung up against
Speaker 1: the wall of the oven, which is extremely hot, and
Speaker 1: that's why you see like the blackening and browning, you know,
Speaker 1: the and the and the big bubbles in non dread
Speaker 1: because it's extremely rapid cooking. It's kind of like pizza making, right,
Speaker 1: and there's rapid expansion of the dough that makes these
Speaker 1: big bubbles in it and charge the underside and then
Speaker 1: it gets pulled off with a hook and then of
Speaker 1: course it's delicious. I'm a big fan of non bread.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder what this fourteen thousand year old
Speaker 1: bread tastes like. I mean, I wonder if it was
Speaker 1: non bread. Probably not quite because I I doubt they were,
Speaker 1: you know, putting butter on it or any um. But
Speaker 1: but it's fascinating that this discovery is because when you
Speaker 1: think about it, it reverses is the order of technological
Speaker 1: adaptation that had long been assumed. Like we long thought
Speaker 1: that people developed agriculture first, which allowed them to grow
Speaker 1: large amounts of grain, and having all this grain led
Speaker 1: to the invention of bread and baking. But this discovery
Speaker 1: makes it look like the opposite is the case. Instead.
Speaker 1: Ancient hunter gatherers probably gathered grain from wild grasses and
Speaker 1: figured out how to turn it into bread. Then they
Speaker 1: settled down and developed farming to grow the grain. Thousands
Speaker 1: of years later. On this model, baking preceded agriculture. You
Speaker 1: had bread first and then farming. That is incredible. We
Speaker 1: had to think about it now. In researching the origins
Speaker 1: of bread, I ended up turning to a wonderful book
Speaker 1: by Michael Pollen that is also a wonderful Netflix series
Speaker 1: titled Cooked, which I recommend either you know, watch watch
Speaker 1: the show. It's fabulous, but also the book is tremendous
Speaker 1: as well, and is also like available for a very
Speaker 1: reasonable price right now. But he points out that a
Speaker 1: whole grain loaf is full of flavor and air, so
Speaker 1: it's it's also and it's also so much more than
Speaker 1: the sum of its parts. He points out that if
Speaker 1: you gave someone the ingredients for bread and they had
Speaker 1: to consume them as as is, they'd stuff. But give
Speaker 1: them the bread, you know, or there at least the
Speaker 1: Promethean knowledge of bread baking and that they will eat
Speaker 1: and survive. Um, you know, it's it's again we have
Speaker 1: to just come back to We take it for granted,
Speaker 1: because it's everywhere, but bread is it's almost like this
Speaker 1: neolithic or paleolithic space shuttle, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: of what it does with invention. Um Paullen has an
Speaker 1: excellent passage in the book where he he discusses the
Speaker 1: invention of bread, and he points out that the pre
Speaker 1: bread way of consuming these various grass seeds was to
Speaker 1: simply toast them on a fire, or to grind them
Speaker 1: between stones and boil them into a very basic porridge,
Speaker 1: uh quote. And we should pour it out by the
Speaker 1: way that a lot of people throughout history that ate
Speaker 1: cereal grains as as as a food stable did eat
Speaker 1: them in some kind of porridge form that would kind
Speaker 1: have always been made into a bread. A lot of
Speaker 1: times they'd be just like boiled in some liquid. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Pollen says quote. The inert mush that resulted might
Speaker 1: not have made for inspiring meals, but it was simple
Speaker 1: enough to prepare and nutritious enough to eat, providing us
Speaker 1: with the energy of starch as well as some protein,
Speaker 1: vitamins and minerals. But of course, then you know, at
Speaker 1: some point those ancient people began to realize that you
Speaker 1: could do something else with this thick gruel, because we
Speaker 1: can only assume they got rather tired of it, you know,
Speaker 1: as tiresome as it sounds, right, So they found that
Speaker 1: you could spread the out the gruel on a hot
Speaker 1: cooking stone and make simple unleavened flatbread, or perhaps to
Speaker 1: bring back to our example, you know, throw it in
Speaker 1: on the side like splatted, like maybe somebody just got
Speaker 1: sick of their over thick porridge one day and we're like, like,
Speaker 1: screw this, I'm not eating it, and threw it in
Speaker 1: there and flow and behold, flatbread was born. But Poullen writes,
Speaker 1: and he's talking, he throws out the date six thousand
Speaker 1: years ago in ancient Egypt. He says that that roughly
Speaker 1: six thousand years ago in ancient Egypt, something happened. Perhaps
Speaker 1: someone left a bowl of porridge in a corner of
Speaker 1: the kitchen for a few days. Um, you know that
Speaker 1: matt might have been what happened, something like that. But
Speaker 1: then bubbles began to rise up. Right, the mask grew
Speaker 1: like a living thing. Dough was born, and when it
Speaker 1: was heated in an oven, it grew larger still, quote,
Speaker 1: springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an
Speaker 1: area yet stable structure that resembled a sponge, and so
Speaker 1: Paullen writes that it was it probably seemed like magic
Speaker 1: at the time, with the food increasing threefold and volume. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you can imagine the fairy tale of this,
Speaker 1: like the porridge that was forgotten and then grew threefolds.
Speaker 1: You know. Now, of course the expansion is due to
Speaker 1: the air, as we've previously discussed. But you know, this,
Speaker 1: this invention of bread, this invention of of baking, he says,
Speaker 1: constituted quote the world's first food processing industry. And and
Speaker 1: I do want to I just want to read one
Speaker 1: more quote he has from the book, just summing up
Speaker 1: what we've been discussing here. Quote. Most foods, even the
Speaker 1: whole hog, are altered versions of nature's already existing animals
Speaker 1: and plants, which more or less retain their form after cooking.
Speaker 1: But a loaf of bread is something new added to
Speaker 1: the world, an edged object, wrestled from the flux of nature,
Speaker 1: and specifically from the living, shifting Dionysian swamp that is
Speaker 1: dough bread is the Apollonian food. So I love that
Speaker 1: just bringing out this into the mythic qualities of this
Speaker 1: and the idea again that that bread is an invention.
Speaker 1: It is not part of the natural world. It is
Speaker 1: a thing that we made and invented out of the
Speaker 1: natural world. Bread is order out of chaos. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will turn our attention to toast. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: so we've got bread. The next logical step is to
Speaker 1: make some toast. Let's discuss how that came about. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, it appears that toast is also a
Speaker 1: tradition stretching into the ancient world. We don't know for sure,
Speaker 1: but it's probably, I mean, we just have to assume
Speaker 1: not much younger a tradition than bread itself, right, because
Speaker 1: in a way, toast is just a continuation of the
Speaker 1: cooking process of bread by you know, you slice it
Speaker 1: and further expose the bread to heat, scorching it, and this,
Speaker 1: of course, uh, you know, we do it because it
Speaker 1: contributes to changes in both the texture and the taste
Speaker 1: of bread. So it further dehydrates the bread and helps
Speaker 1: make it crisp, which is useful for some some things
Speaker 1: we want. But also the flavor changes or a big
Speaker 1: thing going on there. You know, toasting bread causes browning
Speaker 1: of the sugars and the amino acids that make up
Speaker 1: the natural proteins within within the bread, and this complex
Speaker 1: set of chemical reactions all taking place during browning is
Speaker 1: collectively known as the Myard reaction, and it's generally why
Speaker 1: browned food tastes so good, like different versions of the
Speaker 1: same thing are taking place, whether you're toasting bread or
Speaker 1: searing steak on a grill. The browning is the evidence
Speaker 1: of this huge suite of complex chemical changes that produce
Speaker 1: new compounds with interesting flavors and aromas that we associate
Speaker 1: with roastinus, toastinus, nuttiness, meetin nous, and all these other
Speaker 1: flavors that that are so good when we when we
Speaker 1: give food a good browning, but not so much when
Speaker 1: we blackened food completely and turn it into burned food,
Speaker 1: which tends to yield a kind of bitter charcoally taste. Yes, toast,
Speaker 1: good burnt toast. Now, it's not known for sure why
Speaker 1: toast was invented, but obviously one candidate explanation seems pretty
Speaker 1: promising to me at least for the invention of toast
Speaker 1: is that it began like so many other great culinary
Speaker 1: techniques like smoking and curing, like pickling, as a method
Speaker 1: for extending the life of foods. So we all know this,
Speaker 1: right you have you have a loaf of bread in
Speaker 1: your house, and the day you get it, especially if
Speaker 1: you get it you know, fresh baked, to the day
Speaker 1: the day was baked, it's amazing. You've you've got this
Speaker 1: freshness window. And the second day maybe it's still okay.
Speaker 1: But like it's like a mayfly, It flourishes for a
Speaker 1: day or two, and then it declines as the bread
Speaker 1: grows stale, and it takes on this unappealing taste and texture.
Speaker 1: And here's where toasting comes in. It's a perfect resurrection
Speaker 1: method for fresh bread that is no longer fresh. Toast,
Speaker 1: you know, toast some less than fresh bread, and it's
Speaker 1: a whole new thing, right Yeah, it's a way of
Speaker 1: it's sort of bringing it back to life. I can
Speaker 1: also imagine that if one were in a particularly frigid climate,
Speaker 1: that it would make sense to resurrect your bread that
Speaker 1: might not not not only might it be going of
Speaker 1: its stale, but it also might be rather cold or
Speaker 1: even rock hard, and would need to be reheated is
Speaker 1: for comfortable consumption, Yeah, totally. But while so, of course,
Speaker 1: of course toasting does remain a good way to resurrect
Speaker 1: bread that's fallen beyond its peak of freshness. Of course,
Speaker 1: we we toast perfectly fresh bread as well for purely
Speaker 1: you know, culinary aesthetic reasons, reasons relating to the way
Speaker 1: it feels and tastes and looks in the texture. And
Speaker 1: it's just for enjoyment. We just like toast. It's good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of one of my favorite recipes that again involves
Speaker 1: a tomato but also involves toast, is a panzanella salad,
Speaker 1: which is which is rather a bread resurrection recipe and
Speaker 1: of itself often calling for stale bread, uh, but that
Speaker 1: is then soaked in oil and vinegar. And this seems
Speaker 1: to date back to at least the sixteen hundreds when uh,
Speaker 1: an Italian artist by the name of Bronzino saying it's praises.
Speaker 1: But you also find rather recipes that call for like
Speaker 1: for for fresh bread that is toasted and the bread
Speaker 1: takes on in in in my opinion, a very like
Speaker 1: meaty consists. Can see and uh, you know, and I
Speaker 1: guess it's because you have you know, these these flavors
Speaker 1: coming together. You know, you have some basalt mac you
Speaker 1: have some olive oil, you have the tomatoes themselves, and
Speaker 1: then the the just the texture of the toast or bread. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so toasted bread, because it's undergoing the myard reaction to
Speaker 1: a degree, it gets that kind of roasty flavor, which
Speaker 1: in some ways tastes kind of meaty to us. Then
Speaker 1: also if you've got tomatoes in the salad, tomatoes have
Speaker 1: a lot of glutamates and that, and that's also something
Speaker 1: we associate with the kind of meaty taste. But again,
Speaker 1: the end result is like just another level beyond bread,
Speaker 1: you know, and the toast just feels that much more
Speaker 1: removed from the you know, the original and just grains
Speaker 1: that have been collected from these various grasses. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a wonderful journey through human history. Now, I guess we
Speaker 1: should maybe turn to the toaster, because while we have
Speaker 1: some clues about the circumstances in which bread and toast
Speaker 1: a rose, we don't know who ultimately invented them that,
Speaker 1: you know, that that's just in the fog. But we
Speaker 1: do have some indications about toasters in history, right, we
Speaker 1: know where these came from. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: there are plenty of just very standard ways you could
Speaker 1: toast a piece of bread. Put it on a stick,
Speaker 1: leave it on that baking stone, grill it, you know,
Speaker 1: put it in one of these ovens that you've constructed,
Speaker 1: and so forth. But at least in the early nineteenth
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, we begin to see specialized toasting apparatus is
Speaker 1: for toasting bread over or adjacent to open flames, And
Speaker 1: many of these were pretty straightforward, just a metal framework
Speaker 1: in which to brace slices of bread, all at the
Speaker 1: end of like a long handle, so you're not burning
Speaker 1: your fingers off. And some of some of these hearth
Speaker 1: toasters even had a swiveling mechanism so that you could
Speaker 1: like toast one side of the bread, then swivel it
Speaker 1: around and toast the others. And these methods all work
Speaker 1: perfectly well today, just as they worked in their inception.
Speaker 1: So why invent a toaster in the modern sense of
Speaker 1: the word, Well, it all comes down ultimately to our
Speaker 1: busy lives in the kitchen and beyond the kitchen, Because
Speaker 1: the beauty of a toaster or a toaster, then is
Speaker 1: that it allows us to automate our toast making somewhat
Speaker 1: stick the toast in, start the machine, busy yourself with coffee, eggs,
Speaker 1: or what have you, and not have to worry as
Speaker 1: much about the house burning down in the process. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in a way we're talking about building towards
Speaker 1: a toasting automaton or you know, toasting robot. So a
Speaker 1: few key features factor into all the of our various
Speaker 1: attempts to elevate toasting technology. But the first and most
Speaker 1: important was the creation of an electric heating system to
Speaker 1: eliminate the need for gas or open flame. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: we kind of take electric heating elements for granted today,
Speaker 1: don't we. We don't realize that this was was a
Speaker 1: difficult problem at one point. Yeah, it was trickier than
Speaker 1: you might imagine, because you need to create a heating element,
Speaker 1: you know, something that can be heated up due to
Speaker 1: an electric current. But it also it has to come
Speaker 1: it has to be able to sustain repeated high temperatures
Speaker 1: and not fail. You know, it needs to be able
Speaker 1: to heat up, heat back and then cool back down
Speaker 1: and up again and back down on and uh. And
Speaker 1: so you know, that was something people worked at for
Speaker 1: a while in the history of making toast from Hagley
Speaker 1: dot Org. The author's point to Albert Marsh's nineteen o
Speaker 1: five uh nichrome filament wire with an alloy of nickel
Speaker 1: and chromium, being like the key advancement here, it was
Speaker 1: both safe and durable when heated by the electric current.
Speaker 1: Then in nineteen o six, the first US patent application
Speaker 1: was filed for an electric toaster using Marsh's wire, and
Speaker 1: this was by George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater
Speaker 1: Company of Detroit. And then in nineteen o eight, General
Speaker 1: Electric patented the General Electric D twelve toaster and rolled
Speaker 1: it out in nineteen o nine, and this one used
Speaker 1: Marsh's uh nichrome technology as well. And Gail L. Goudie
Speaker 1: has an excellent blog post about this model at the
Speaker 1: College of Charleston's Architecture and Art History Club. Uh. It's um,
Speaker 1: it's it doesn't look like a toast. It looks like
Speaker 1: a porcelain has like a porcelain base in this kind
Speaker 1: of tesla coil looking post trapped right on top of it.
Speaker 1: Uh and it looks like a torture cage for bread. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Gaudi drives home that this item was a luxury.
Speaker 1: It costs four dollars in nineteen o nine, which she
Speaker 1: says is roughly a hundred dollars today. So this would
Speaker 1: have been this would have been something, uh that the
Speaker 1: elite had. I just want to read a quote from
Speaker 1: her summary quote. A General Electric advertisement from eight taken
Speaker 1: from the Library of Congress, depicts two well dressed women
Speaker 1: setting at a table leisurely having breakfast with their D
Speaker 1: twelve toaster, complete with a floral design and the ceramic
Speaker 1: base setting beside them. Women were the main target for
Speaker 1: General Electrics advertisements because they were seen as the consumers
Speaker 1: of the household. One major selling point was the ability
Speaker 1: to quote get out of the messy kitchen and be
Speaker 1: able to join your company in quote the comfortable dining room.
Speaker 1: This made the D twelve tote not only a more
Speaker 1: practical and efficient way to toast bread, but also a
Speaker 1: way to show off to others, so, you know, conspicuous
Speaker 1: toast consumption. Yeah, you know. And it's like it's a
Speaker 1: way of like, oh, well, we can make bread at
Speaker 1: the tape. It's almost like a like a fondue pot
Speaker 1: for toast, you know. But it was a hit, and
Speaker 1: it proved the first commercially successful electric toaster. But one
Speaker 1: of the problems with the D twelve was that you
Speaker 1: had to turn the toast yourself. So enter the Copeman
Speaker 1: Electric Stove Companies nineteen thirteen or possibly I Whole se
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen. So we may be dealing with patent versus
Speaker 1: actual rollout. But this model turned the toast for you,
Speaker 1: and it was designed by Lloyd Groff Copeman. Then in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen Minnesota, Minnesota mechanic named Charles Perkins Strite created
Speaker 1: a restaurant grade toaster, and in nineteen one he patented
Speaker 1: the automatic pop up toaster. Ah, this is the one
Speaker 1: that's in all the movies. Yeah, this was This was
Speaker 1: a key advance. But no longer was it merely a
Speaker 1: little like a gadget that allows you to toast bread
Speaker 1: at your table and like this kind of fonn do manner.
Speaker 1: This was a design that times you're toasting to prevent
Speaker 1: burnt toast popping it out of the heated interior. When
Speaker 1: it was finished. Waters Genter of Minneapolis began selling a
Speaker 1: redesigned version in nine and this was called the Toastmaster.
Speaker 1: And in this we had a pop up home toaster
Speaker 1: that browned both sides at once via timed heating element
Speaker 1: with ejection, the modern toaster was born, and really it's
Speaker 1: essentially the same design that's widespread today, though this was
Speaker 1: much bulkier. It looks huge, Yeah, it does. It looks
Speaker 1: like it looks like like a huge toaster on top
Speaker 1: of another apparatus. It looks like like its own little oven.
Speaker 1: It looks like a toaster on top of a slot machine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now you Now. We could easily spend the rest of
Speaker 1: the episode just discussing the various technological improvements, then bridge
Speaker 1: the gap between the toastmaster and whatever you have in
Speaker 1: your own kitchen. We could also focus on its siblings,
Speaker 1: like the toaster oven, which is much much the same principle,
Speaker 1: except it's a since a small oven and it's a
Speaker 1: lot more versatile. I'm more of a toaster oven kind
Speaker 1: of person. Uh. Yeah, you can do a lot more
Speaker 1: different kinds of stuff with it. Yeah, that's what we
Speaker 1: have in our house. Um. Then there's also the conveyor toaster,
Speaker 1: which dates back to ninety eight or so. And is
Speaker 1: I'm sure anyone who's ever enjoyed a continental breakfast at
Speaker 1: a hotel you've seen this you know, it has a
Speaker 1: little conveyor and it it takes the toast on a
Speaker 1: little journey that heats it and then drops it out
Speaker 1: at the bottom. Uh yeah. Unfortunately, at one time, I
Speaker 1: remember it was around some high schoolers who were fooling
Speaker 1: around with one of these things, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: caught on fire. Oh. I think they were putting stuff
Speaker 1: in it. This shouldn't go in. It gets stuck in there.
Speaker 1: Usually the only place you encounter it is in you know,
Speaker 1: like a continental breakfast situation. But I think the beauty
Speaker 1: of this episode is that at this point we returned
Speaker 1: to bread itself and consider the way that the toaster
Speaker 1: changes bread. And we've already discussed how baking was, you know,
Speaker 1: again in Pollen's words, quote world the world's first food
Speaker 1: processing industry. And in the nineteenth and twentieth tree this
Speaker 1: all continued and we saw what Poullen referred to as
Speaker 1: quote the reductive logic of industrial bread baking, because to
Speaker 1: feed the needs of the toaster, you need rather standardized
Speaker 1: bread slice sizes, and this led to the invention of
Speaker 1: machines to pre sliced loafs. So otto Frederick Roy Vetter
Speaker 1: is credited with inventing the world's first commercial bread slicing machine,
Speaker 1: and this was installed in a Chillicothe, Missouri, at the
Speaker 1: Chilicothe Baking Company. And on July seven this when this
Speaker 1: thing fired up and began slicing loaves of bread into
Speaker 1: regimented slices, uh, you know, pre sale. And this was
Speaker 1: two years before Wonderbread started marketing its own pre wrap
Speaker 1: pre sliced bread nationwide. Now, one thing that comes about
Speaker 1: with this era of you know, the bag sliced bread,
Speaker 1: is where people begin to assume the uniformity of bread
Speaker 1: as a product. Whereas bread, as we were saying earlier,
Speaker 1: is is something with such an amazing diversity of forms
Speaker 1: and recipes and flavors. I mean, bread is sort of
Speaker 1: half the cooking world, and its diversity reflects that. But
Speaker 1: if you go down the bread aisle in the grocery
Speaker 1: store and see all the industrial made bread that's all
Speaker 1: pretty much the same shape and size, you wouldn't get
Speaker 1: that impression. No, no, I mean it. You end up
Speaker 1: with this very again regimented uh slice situation. And you know,
Speaker 1: generally that's that's a lot of times, that's the bread
Speaker 1: we grew up with. Maybe perhaps that's still the bread
Speaker 1: you kind of get today. But you know, there have
Speaker 1: been some commentators who have really lingered on the sadness
Speaker 1: of all of this. And I believe you found out
Speaker 1: a wonderful paper that some some of this up. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a paper by a communications scholar
Speaker 1: named Arthur asa Berger who was writing about toast as
Speaker 1: something that's sort of like emblematic of the sort of
Speaker 1: like industrial alienation of the modern world. And it was
Speaker 1: a paper just called the Toaster from et cetera orvie
Speaker 1: you of general semantics, and published in nine And I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from his From his conclusion here,
Speaker 1: Burger writes, Ultimately, the toaster is an apology for the
Speaker 1: quality of our bread. It attempts heroically to transform the
Speaker 1: semi sweet, characterless, plastic package bread that we have learned
Speaker 1: to love into something more palatable and more manageable. Perhaps
Speaker 1: our handling this bread and warming it up gives us
Speaker 1: a sense that the bread now has a human touch
Speaker 1: to it, is not an abstract, almost unreal product. The
Speaker 1: toaster represents a heroic attempt to redeem our packaged bread,
Speaker 1: to redeem the unredeemable, but the toaster, despite its high
Speaker 1: tech functions, is doomed. The continual repetition of Adam and
Speaker 1: Eve's fall for an unregenerate bread cannot be saved. Every
Speaker 1: piece of toast is a tragedy. I love that, you know,
Speaker 1: agree or disagree, But the good news is that they
Speaker 1: you can buy bread that wasn't baked by a machine,
Speaker 1: and you can toast it in a variety of ways,
Speaker 1: essentially using your own hand. I'd i'd encourage everyone to
Speaker 1: try that. I'd encourage everyone to at least make some
Speaker 1: sort of bread at some point in your life, because
Speaker 1: it it allows you to sort of tap into that
Speaker 1: feeling of magic that must have accompanied, you know, the
Speaker 1: the initial creations, the initial invention of bread. Now, if
Speaker 1: you have wanted to bake bread at home, by the way,
Speaker 1: but you're like, hey, I don't have one of these
Speaker 1: commercial bakery bread ovens, you know, I don't have the equipment. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are actually great recipes you can look up online
Speaker 1: that just require a Dutch oven inside a normal kind
Speaker 1: of oven that you'd have at home to make like
Speaker 1: a really good boulangerie style loaf. So I recommend looking
Speaker 1: that up. All right, Well, it looks like we need
Speaker 1: to take a quick break, but we will be right back.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So we've talked about the birth
Speaker 1: of bread. We've talked about hoasting, We've talked about this
Speaker 1: fabulous invention the toaster. We've talked about one kind of toasting,
Speaker 1: but then another kind of toasting of what kind of
Speaker 1: tough Yes, of course we haven't talked about the toast.
Speaker 1: Here is to your health, right, which it's easy to
Speaker 1: just assume that there's no connection between the two. I know,
Speaker 1: I never really thought about there being a connection between
Speaker 1: a a piece of toast and a formal you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, glassware clinking event at a fine dinner or something,
Speaker 1: you know, along those lines. If you had asked me,
Speaker 1: I probably would have assumed it was a false cognate,
Speaker 1: one of those things that's just like a word that
Speaker 1: happens to sound like another word but has unrelated roots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, it looks like there's there
Speaker 1: are some firm connections there, and then there's kind of
Speaker 1: an argument on both sides. But I was looking looking
Speaker 1: at an article, an excellent article on Atlas Obscura's gastro
Speaker 1: obscura um section, which is kind of almost like a
Speaker 1: subsite that they have which is food related and it's
Speaker 1: really good. I think I even wrote a piece for
Speaker 1: them a while back. What I said about it is
Speaker 1: about Marichino cherries. Marichino cherries. But anyway, this particular pieces
Speaker 1: by and You Bank and it was titled Toasting your
Speaker 1: Friends once involved actual toast. Okay, convinced me, all right,
Speaker 1: So but here's how it goes, as e Bank lays
Speaker 1: it out. Basically, there are a few different theories about
Speaker 1: where toast comes from, as in like toasting someone. One
Speaker 1: relates to a sixteenth century German practice of shouting the
Speaker 1: Latin word proceed, meaning may it do you good? But
Speaker 1: another is that it ties in with the history of
Speaker 1: putting toast in alcohol. That sounds weird. Well, but but
Speaker 1: but does it? What? What do you be here? More
Speaker 1: specifically toasting with beer or wine that is garnished with bread. Okay,
Speaker 1: that somehow beer or wine makes more sense. What I
Speaker 1: was imagining was vodka martini like James Bond drinks, except
Speaker 1: instead of the little toothpick with an olive in it,
Speaker 1: it's just a piece of toast. Well, I'm all up
Speaker 1: for some inventive garnishes, and in fact, a few year
Speaker 1: is back, I found a cocktail recipe on It was
Speaker 1: on the Hendrix Gin website. You know, generally these you know,
Speaker 1: big alcohol brands will have recipes on their website, and
Speaker 1: Hendrix is is no exception. Uh, And they had a
Speaker 1: recipe for a cocktail that I don't think it's hosted
Speaker 1: on the current version of the side. But it called
Speaker 1: for some sparkling wine. It called for I believe some bitters, uh,
Speaker 1: some marmalade I want to say, kind of muddled in
Speaker 1: the bottom, some gin, of course, and it was a
Speaker 1: really good drink. But it also called for a garnish
Speaker 1: of a small piece of toast, which at the time
Speaker 1: I was like, well, that's weird, and I'm I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna skip that part because I don't really understand it
Speaker 1: and I don't want to, like additionally like make toast
Speaker 1: for the drink, So you know, I just kind of
Speaker 1: skipped over it. I would have probably been into it
Speaker 1: had I had it at a restaurant, but I just
Speaker 1: hadn't thought about it since until I started reading this article.
Speaker 1: So when we get into this idea of beer and
Speaker 1: wine combined with toast. It relates to SOPs. Yes, ops
Speaker 1: as in as in too like sop up something, And
Speaker 1: SOPs were chunks of of sodden toasted bread in a
Speaker 1: bowl of warm wine if you were you know, medieval
Speaker 1: upper crust uh and a mere high calorie piece of
Speaker 1: ale soaked toast if you were part of the ample
Speaker 1: underclass at medieval times in medieval Europe. And the author
Speaker 1: also adds quote the English even covered apple trees insider
Speaker 1: dipped toast as part of an ancient ritual for a
Speaker 1: good harvest. So with SOPs were generally talking about white
Speaker 1: bread toasted and then flavored with sugar, ginger, or herbs.
Speaker 1: And then the British supper and soup even derived from sop.
Speaker 1: Apparently milk sop as an insult is also derived from
Speaker 1: this word. While sop became less essential to European cuisine,
Speaker 1: French onion soup is supposedly a survivor of the custom
Speaker 1: French onion soup. Of course, you know, it generally has
Speaker 1: like that big piece of bread in there, which I
Speaker 1: think is something that either you love it or that
Speaker 1: turns you off a little bit, there being like essentially
Speaker 1: a big soggy piece of bread in your soup, which
Speaker 1: camper you in. I like it. I do think it's
Speaker 1: it's definitely a soup that needs to be I like
Speaker 1: to eat it right away. I don't think you should
Speaker 1: let it completely disintegrate in your soup, right. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's one of those where it helps to have
Speaker 1: one of those uh, you know, crustier, chewier kind of
Speaker 1: high protein breads, you know, with like a chewy gluten matrix,
Speaker 1: that those work better in that kind of thing than
Speaker 1: like a you know, a soft, cakey kind of bread. Right.
Speaker 1: And of course it's a it's traditionally a neat based soup,
Speaker 1: but there are some excellent mushroom based recipes for it
Speaker 1: out there, because yeah, usually they would have a beef
Speaker 1: broth piece. Yeah, that's generally true though, that that mushrooms
Speaker 1: make an excellent substitute, like a vegetarian substitute for beef flavor,
Speaker 1: like anything that calls for beef broth or anything beefy.
Speaker 1: You can put mushrooms in there, and I think you'll
Speaker 1: have more textural differences than taste differences. Actually, yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: bring out like an neunami kind of flavoring, right, mommy, mommy,
Speaker 1: you know me. Uh yeah, I mean I remember even
Speaker 1: like growing up, like occasionally we would have when we
Speaker 1: were you know, eating meat as a family, like the
Speaker 1: mushroom gravy would be brought out as a way to
Speaker 1: enhance the cut of meat. You know. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: know it makes sense that even even in if the
Speaker 1: meat is completely gone, the mushroom or mushroom grave you're
Speaker 1: some sort of mushroom based of flavoring will do the job.
Speaker 1: A great cooking tip if you ever use dried chitaki
Speaker 1: mushrooms in your home, uh and you you know, reconstitute
Speaker 1: them in hot water to heat them up. Don't just
Speaker 1: use the mushrooms and throw out the broth. That broth
Speaker 1: that you reconstituted them in is gold. Now you can
Speaker 1: like reduce it, you can freeze it, you can use
Speaker 1: it in soups and anything. It tastes amazing. Another survivor
Speaker 1: of this, uh this SOPs legacy is apparently was s
Speaker 1: ale Um. I don't think I know what that is.
Speaker 1: You know, it's in the traditional like holiday punch type
Speaker 1: type beverage. Here we go whostling that that's sort of
Speaker 1: well like taking the punch out or getting punch or
Speaker 1: well yeah, kind of like you know, the holiday sharing
Speaker 1: of the punch the wall sale tradition, but apparently like
Speaker 1: traditionally it also had toast in it. Here here we
Speaker 1: go aboozing is what that means? Yes, okay, and then
Speaker 1: toasting each other's health became apparently became more of a
Speaker 1: fat in the seventeen hundreds, and the name indeed may
Speaker 1: derive from the fact that these beverages that people were
Speaker 1: toasting with we're often topped with SOPs. It does make
Speaker 1: me wonder if if SOPs will ever make a real comeback,
Speaker 1: you know, if say, twenty years from now, like the
Speaker 1: new trendy restaurant in New York will be all sop space,
Speaker 1: you know, because because the other you know, other toast
Speaker 1: items have never really gone out of style. I think
Speaker 1: I think there has been kind of a resurgence of
Speaker 1: of toast in recent years, and avocado toast, but then
Speaker 1: also just uh, you know, some chefs kind of like
Speaker 1: focusing in on something uh in some cases toast and saying,
Speaker 1: all right, what is it about a good slice of
Speaker 1: toast that works? And what how can we deconstruct that?
Speaker 1: And and and maybe even put some sort of new
Speaker 1: twist on it. Oh yeah, now that you mentioned that
Speaker 1: there there's at least one kind of hip restaurant in
Speaker 1: town here that we go to sometimes. It does it.
Speaker 1: It's got like a whole toasts section of itself. It's
Speaker 1: just like toasts with you know, it'll have like a
Speaker 1: like a salmon spread topping, or like a like a
Speaker 1: mushroom and ricotta topping or something. Yeah. I wonder if
Speaker 1: this would be interesting to hear from anyone out there,
Speaker 1: who is you know, who's who's active in the culinary
Speaker 1: world or the mixology world. I would I would love
Speaker 1: to know if anybody is attempting to bring back the
Speaker 1: toast garnish. Was that Hendricks drink that I saw online?
Speaker 1: Was that just kind of a flash in the pan,
Speaker 1: or just like a you know, a lone survivor of
Speaker 1: the tradition, or is there anybody out there saying, Hey,
Speaker 1: we used to put toast in our drinks and we
Speaker 1: should do it again. It's essential. Stop trying to make
Speaker 1: toast drinks happen, Robert, It's not going to happen. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. I I want to try a
Speaker 1: good one. I want to I want to try an
Speaker 1: authentic one. Well, you know what, I can actually imagine
Speaker 1: more so than I guess. It would depend on the
Speaker 1: consistency of the drink. Like, if it's like an eggnog
Speaker 1: kind of thing, you definitely see using toasting that if
Speaker 1: it's like a if it's like a more watery, consistency
Speaker 1: type drink, I'm having a harder time imagining actually dipping
Speaker 1: the toast in it to any good effect, but I
Speaker 1: could imagine it would be a nice pairing of aromas.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are some drinks that call for just
Speaker 1: like scenting a glass with an aroma. Like sometimes people
Speaker 1: will make a drink where they smoke the glass, you know,
Speaker 1: like burn aboard and put the glass on it, and
Speaker 1: then there's smoke on the glass that gives it this
Speaker 1: kind of scent, and then they add the drink to
Speaker 1: the glass. I could see a similar thing happening with toast,
Speaker 1: because toast is such a pleasant aroma that smell might
Speaker 1: pair well with some types of drinks. I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know with what liquors, but you know, you can
Speaker 1: imagine that. Yeah, well, maybe we can get to the
Speaker 1: point where it's like kind of like the bread bowl
Speaker 1: that you have for for spinach dips. Sometimes like the
Speaker 1: bread chalice, the bread bowl is actually the ultimate stop
Speaker 1: that stopped to the stream. Right whoever thought that up
Speaker 1: as a genius? Huh, yeah, this is We really only
Speaker 1: scratched the surface on like bread traditions and all that
Speaker 1: we said. You know, we didn't devote the whole episode.
Speaker 1: You just bread. And every culture has its own spin
Speaker 1: on particular uses of bread. Uh, you know the things
Speaker 1: certainly you stick into bread. Basically there's a hot pocket
Speaker 1: of some form and just about every culture. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: you know we don't we don't have time to go
Speaker 1: into all of those today. But but bread is an
Speaker 1: important part of of human culture, of human history and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, even though it's just our everyday sustenance most
Speaker 1: of the time, we should stop and appreciate this fabulous invention,
Speaker 1: well said Robert. All right. If you would like to
Speaker 1: check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to
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Speaker 1: to do so, and make sure you have subscribed. Huge
Speaker 1: thanks to our audio producers for this episode O Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like to
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