"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."
From Toast: the story of a boy's hunger by Nigel Slater.
"In 1782 Carl-Philip Moritz, a German visitor to London, enthused that '...there is a way of roasting slices of buttered bread before the fire which is incomparable. One slice after another is taken and held to the fire with a fork until the butter is melted, then the following one will be always laid upon it so that the butter soaks through the whole pile of slices. This is called 'toast'.'"
From Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking by Kate Colquhoun.
"Milk Toast for the Ill, Weak, Old, Very Young, or Weary... The basis for the whole is toasted bread soaked in warm milk. The sweet butter, the seasoning, the cream and the milk - these are sops indeed to the sybarite in even the sickest of us. I have used this bland prescription more than once upon myself, recognising a flicker across my cheekbones, a humming near my elbows and my knees, that meant fatigue had crept too close to the fortress walls. I have found partaking of a warm bowl full of it, in an early bed after a long bath, a very wise medicine - and me but weary, not ill, weak, old, not very young!"
From The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher.
