Burn. Scrape. Eat.

My new toaster is way too complicated for me. Why? I can’t figure out how to perform the simple task of toasting bread.

My last toaster had only two buttons, and it always made perfect toast. This new one is far more modern with multiple buttons and multiple choices to make for toasting a couple of pieces of bread. I have yet to get perfect toast from this modern machine.

Toasting some bread for a BLT sandwich at noon took me back 50 years or so. That’s because I used the same procedure for making toast today that my mother did in the 1950s: burn the bread; scrape the toast; eat the toast.

Toast in my childhood home was always scraped, and there were always burned fragments that still clung to the toast; the fragments always stuck to the butter knife. That meant our butter always had little black spots on it.

I didn’t realize until I took home economics in the 9^th grade that there was another way to prepare toast: toast the bread; eat the bread. I asked my teacher why she didn’t scrape the toast before we ate it. She had no idea what I was talking about.

I haven’t had a piece of burned/scraped toast in a long, long time. Like my mother used to do, today I scraped my burned toast into the sink. And like my mother did, I think I’ll leave it there until supper.