June 22, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

When I was young, just a few years after the double-digit years began, I referred to a slice of toast as “toast bread,” incorrect but that is what my father said, and you emulate the old man whether you should or not (in my Dad’s case, more of that was better than less). “Toasted bread” would have been right, of course, but in the American vernacular, “toast” is enough.

Ah, but is today’s toast “enough,” if you take a deeper look?

I’m an ordinary person raised in an ordinary time, and white bread was on the menu in my life then, not the better-tasting, better-for-you wheat or rye or multigrain. White bread is what hit the Toastmaster on school mornings or occasionally at supper when the desired fare was light and Cherrios needed stiff-bread company and its taste.

The Toastmaster, which unlike today’s overseas toaster specials bought at Amazon or in the big boxes instead of from the once long-serving community appliance shops, actually was repairable and endurable and lasted some 50 years. It had a wonderful feature that allowed the toast to go down automatically, and if you aimed just right, as young schoolchildren will try to do on a morning when they are already late for class, you might just get slices in the machine from across the table. Or at least one of the slices from a 24-piece Buttercup brand bread loaf, with “real” butter sloshed across the top before commercial baking.

White American bread, made in the 1950s with refined flour, yes, but still with taste so lacking today because of longer shelf life and so much sugar, was perfect for the Toastmaster. It was not thin, it was not thick. It was not super moist or gummy, like white bread in 2025. It had nooks and crannies, excellent since any bread, before it becomes toast, must have these crevices. They capture flavor, ending up as shades of dark and light no matter how you set the toaster.

I always moved the rheostat, the toasting control, to dark because I wanted not burned toast but bread well on its way.

Sometimes my father would do the honor of making “toast bread,” especially if I had just fallen out of bed at 7:40 and Bus 15 was due four streets away at 7:55. The wonderful smell of toast sent its wisp upstairs and took my hand and put me at the table where dollops of sweet creamery butter that also had taste sat on the offering, ready for me to flatten with a table knife (never butter knives – my mother saved those for company).

“Hurry up and eat your toast bread,” my father would say, “or you will miss the bus.”

Many, many buses later, when I smell burning white bread today, the feet start to move for the run to Karnell, Buena Vista, Eckerson and Pascack roads, a bit of butter and bread still on the lips as I boarded no. 15.

The writer is a retired newspaperman. This essay is built on an earlier column.

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