August 5, 2019 • 47 mins
Who invented toast? Who then went on to invent the toaster? In this episode of Invention, Robert and Joe chase the origins of bread transformed through the Maillard reaction and consider the origins of the specialized mini-oven we use to do it.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And uh, you know this episode is titled
Bread Toast Toasters because we're going to take you on
an odyssey of human invention. Oh. I never thought about
this as an odyssey, but it really is one spanning generations.
(00:25):
It's like two thousand one of space Odyssey, it is.
But of course the middle part of that is toast.
So I just wanted to take a second for us
artist to consider the slice of toast a thing that,
when done right, is absolutely exquisite in its own right,
but also serves as an excellent base for so many
other fine taste sensations. Wouldn't you agree? Oh? I absolutely would.
(00:46):
I there is a food combination that I don't know
if it can be topped. It might especially be a
Southeast United States kind of thing. But we're in tomato
season right now, you know, it's July, especially getting in
to August. That's like peak tomato season. And I just
want to say, as a message to you young folks
out there, if if you have never tried like a
(01:09):
delicious like thick, juicy, vine ripened you know, farmers or
garden tomato. You've only had tomatoes from the grocery store.
You do not understand what a tomato tastes like like.
It is not just better to get a good from
you know, summer tomato from a farmer or a garden.
(01:30):
It's a completely different food, yea. And sometimes it looks
like a different different species altogether, you know, because it
will be like an organic tomato you've had a farmer's
market will sometimes be kind of like weirdly grotesquely bloated
looking and have lines on it. It's not as pristine
as your you know, your grocery store tomato, but that
(01:50):
the taste experiences is beyond yes. And so if you
want to have the most perfect tomato experience, there are
a lot of ways people do it. People make a
crazy salad it or just eat it, you know, sliced
with salt and pepper or something like that. But here
here's something i'd recommend. Get some good bread, toast the bread,
you know, lightly toasted, a little bit of mayonnaise, and
(02:11):
fresh sliced summer tomatoes. That is the best meal you
will ever have in your entire life. Oh, I believe it. Yeah,
we've we've been doing a lot of these. We don't
do bacon anymore, but we've basically been doing b lts,
but with sausage standing in for the bacon. And it's
but with the with really good tomatoes and it's fabulous.
But even without tomatoes, I mean, think of all the
(02:33):
things that toast is great with. I mean, you can
put some marmalade, some butter on toast and that's a
home run. Avocado toast has been a huge hit in
recent years, and because for a great reason it is wonderful.
Avocado toast is basically just another form of buttered toast,
because avocado is like fruit butter. Yeah, but it's exquisite tasting.
(02:55):
I'm also reminded of toad in the hole of your head.
Toad in the hole, you cut a hole out of
the toast, you to agon it. Yeah, yeah, it's great,
it's it's amazing. Yeah. So we're gonna before we get
back to toast and what toast is, we should talk
about what comes before toast, and eventually we'll get into
what comes before that. But let's talk a little bit
about the other great wonder one of the greatest inventions
(03:18):
the humanity has ever devised, that being bread itself, right,
and it's possible to argue that bread is one of
the inventions that made human civilization. It's sort of a
culinary chemistry project because it's not something you find in nature.
Bread is a thing that certainly had to be invented,
(03:39):
and it's this thing that turned the seeds of hardy
grass plants into a scalable staple food that could provide
lots of calories to feed settled populations and and big
settled populations. And before the cultivation of grain crops, most
of the time humans wouldn't be able to grow and
store enough food survive in large numbers in one place.
(04:02):
Like in settled cities, you have to keep moving around
and constantly foraging for food through the hunting of animals
or the gathering of wild plants. The main strain of
thinking about the origins of cities and settled human population
is the cultivation of grasses. Yielding grain crops massively increase
the efficiency of human food production, so you can get
(04:24):
like way more stores of ready calories with less work,
and the thinking usually goes that this is also what
made possible the diversifying of human labor. Since not everybody
had to be involved in getting food all of the time,
more people could be able to spend more of their
time on other types of projects, so crafts like pottery
(04:45):
and weaving, and the creation of tools and weapons and
other technologies, the education of children, the creation of literature
and music, religious rights and duties, and all these other
things that we come to associate with human technology and culture.
And there's st only a case to be made that
cereal crops and the bread that was made with them
played a huge role in making all this possible that
(05:07):
led to the modern world. Now. As for bread itself,
of course, there are a bazillion different ways to make bread, right.
The most essential components, uh too. Pretty much all bread
recipes are water and a flower based on some type
of grain from a grass plant like wheat. So to
make wheat flour, of course, you you've got to take
(05:27):
the fruiting body of the wheat plant, which is the
kernel or the seed, and the wheat plant. By the way,
if you've never actually looked up close at the part
of the wheat that you eat, you know wheat is
a grass. It's like this huge, tall grass, and it's
got this thing on the end that's got the seeds,
and it looks kind of like a furry rattlesnake tail
at the top of the stall. So it's got all
these rattlesnake tails, and you've got to take those rattlesnake
(05:49):
tails off, get the seeds out of them, and then
process those seeds and grind them into a powder. And
of course that powder is the flour. And then to
turn the flour into bread, you have to hydrate it
with water. And if this is like a flat or
unleavened bread, you can just add any other seasonings you
want and bake it as is in an oven or
on a hot surface, and this will tend to produce,
(06:10):
of course, a relatively like flat, chewy bread, like kind
of like a peda or like a tortilla. But the
most common type of bread we're familiar with, and the
kind we think of when we're making toast, is of
course bread that has some kind of leavening, which is
an agent that will create gas bubbles inside the dough
that cause it to rise. And these bubbles, of course
increase the volume of the dough they make it rise,
(06:32):
but they also give the bread a softer texture. And
in the modern world, we've got tons of different kind
of ways of getting bubbles into bread. We've got chemical
agents like baking powder, baking soda, and they create gas
bubbles through chemical reactions that happen after the substances are
added to the dough. But you can also create a
kind of forced mechanical leavening just by like incorporating something
(06:54):
like whipped egg whites, where like the air whipped into
the egg whites forms gas bulls that expand when you
cook it. But of course, the more traditional method of
levining is to use biological agents like yeast. And here
for for listeners of invention and stuff to blow your mind,
we bring things back to the fungal allegiance is this
(07:14):
is zug timoy here, Yeah, this is the Kingdom of
zug awesome. Yeah, zugtimoy comes in yet again with so
many of our best inventions. There's zug timoy derive. So yeast,
of course, is a type of single celled fungal microorganism
found all throughout nature and even in and on our
own bodies. Uh. And the strain most often used today
(07:35):
is Baker's yeast, which is the fungal species Scara micey
serivsy uh So, baker's east actually also serves as the
fermentation agent in the making of beer and wine. So
like when yeast consume carbohydrates, the yeast produced waste products.
Those waste products include C O two, which is the
gas that makes bread rise. But they also include ethanol,
(07:58):
which is alcohol, which of course that's what adds the
alcohol content to beer in wine when it for mints.
And I do think it's generally true that that uh,
you know, bread made with yeast is alcoholic to a
small extent. It's not alcoholic enough to get you drunk,
but but it's but it's there, yeah, yeah, uh and
is of course, there's so many cultural variations of bread
(08:19):
all around the world, using different grains to make the flour.
Like the different grains include like oats or rye, barley, millet, maize, sorghum.
And you've got all the different cooking methods, different leavening agents,
different seasonings. It's an entire world of cuisine. I mean,
I think there's a good reason that you've got like
cooking and baking, you know, like baking is it's not
(08:41):
just bread, is you know, pastries and stuff too, but
like this whole other sort of half of the cooking
world is focused on bread like things. And is it
any wonder that some of the bread like things end
up taking on magical or spiritual potency be it you know,
be it as part of say, uh you know Western
Chris tradition of of taking holy communion or or certainly
(09:04):
examples from aso American culture where uh where where the
the use of maize in in food products, you know,
and in some sort of a flatbread and all it
was considered the you know, the the body of a god.
It was something that you ate in silence because you
were partaking of something holy. Oh wow, Well there is
something mystical about bread, because I think I was hinting
(09:25):
at this a minute ago. But you know, it's not
apparent in nature. Bread is something that was truly an invention.
It's not like something you discovered that was already out
there waiting. Like you had to put together a bunch
of different uh like steps in this process. You know,
you had to get the seeds from these grasses, and
(09:45):
you had to grind them up into powder, and you
had to get that powder wet and make a dough
out of it, and if it's leavened bread, you had
to add some kind of leavening agent to make it
rise or allow you know, natural yeast to get into it.
The would let it rise, and then you had to
bake it at the right temperature and all is just like,
it's not something that's obvious, So you have to wonder
who invented this, Like where did all this knowledge and
(10:08):
process come from? Well, let's talk about it. Unfortunately, it's
another one of those that is that is lost to history, right,
there's no known inventor of bread. It's one of these
great world changing inventions like the wheel that we can
get some clues about, but which, you know, the the
ultimate origin vanishes into prehistory with no single point from
(10:29):
which all of it comes. But we do have some
general knowledge about the origins of bread and bread like products.
So for a long time, it was believed, based on
artistic and archaeological evidence, that bread emerged as a human
invention roughly ten thousand years ago, and this would be
during the Neolithic period, meaning the last part of the
(10:50):
Stone Age, and it would have been in a place
called the Fertile Crescent now the Fertile Crescent is this
sickle shaped expanse of arable land is land where you
can grow crops stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean over into Mesopotamia,
and so from west to east. It sort of starts
down in the Nile River valley in Egypt, and then
(11:10):
it travels up along the Eastern Mediterranean coast through like Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,
and it goes up through southern Turkey, and then it
goes back down through Mesopotamia through a rock in parts
of Iran. And the first wheat crops that were domesticated
in in the Fertile Crescent to make the earliest bread
during the Neolithic Revolution would have been ancestral grasses like
(11:35):
m air wheat which is e M M E R
M R wheat or iron corn wheat. These are grasses
that they are. They're basically other strains of wheat, kind
of like the wheat we we grow today, which is
just known as common wheat. And I think it's not
a it's not a coincidence that this is where many
of the world's oldest and earliest civilizations arose, meaning that
(11:55):
even though there were people all over the world. These
were the places where people first started settling down in
one place, making cities with big populations and diversified economies.
And these cities had to be supported by grain agriculture,
and a lot of that grain was of course used
to make bread and and this has sort of been
the story for a long time, but really interestingly, just
(12:17):
in the past couple of years, it's been revealed that
at least some humans were making bread thousands of years
before this Neolithic agricultural revolution, before all the farming in
the Fertile Crescent started. So the papering question here talking
about this discovery was published in P and A s
(12:37):
in eighteen by Ammia ranzoteg we at All And uh So,
basically the story goes like this. A few years ago,
there's this archaeobotanist, somebody who studies ancient plants named uh
Amaya iran's oteg we I hope I'm saying that right,
uh And she was studying ancient human campsites in Jordan's
(12:57):
and specifically she was looking at an excavator did cooking
site from about fourteen thousand years ago, and this would
have been a camp of people known as the New Tuffians,
who were a culture of hunter gatherers who lived in
this area in the time between the Paleolithic, the Old
Stone Age, and the Neolithic. The more recent Stone Age
(13:18):
between these two technology regimes would have been roughly four
thousand years before settled agriculture started to take over, before
we believed previously that humans invented bread. And then the
Natufians survived on a hunter gatherer basis. They did a
lot of hunting, and their fire pits and food waste
sites were full of bones of wild animals that have
(13:40):
been killed during hunts and eton But at this particular site,
Aronzo teg we also found charred remains of some kind
of plant matter, and so I was reading about how
what she did. She took it to a colleague named
Lara Gonzalez Cartero at University College London and they discovered
these charred food remains were breadcrumbs. These hunter gatherers were
(14:05):
making some form of bread thousands of years before we
previously assumed bread had been invented. Now, the flower used
in this ancient bread had two main ingredients. It was
in corn wheat, which is again it's a wild strain
of wheat grass and then it was the roots of
club rush tubers, which is a type of flower um,
(14:26):
and then it was a lot. There was some other
things in there also, like some spices like mustard and
other trace ingredients like barley, and the researchers think this
dough would have been made to stick to the hot
stone walls lining fire pits. I was reading an NPR
article describing the discovery and h it compared it to
the way that Indian non bread is made to stick
(14:48):
to the walls of a tendur oven. I don't know
if you've ever seen how that's made. There's like, no,
I've never seen this. I just always assumed it was
put in their flat like a pizza. No, there's like
so there's like this vertical hollow oven. It's got the
you know, this fire at the bottom gets extremely hot
and then it's got the walls all around the sides.
And if you see the traditional way or I don't
(15:08):
know if it's the traditional way, at least the way
a lot of like Indian restaurants and Indian kitchens will
make the non bread is they get the dough and
the dough sort of goes on a hook and then
the hook gets uh, the dough gets flung up against
the wall of the oven, which is extremely hot, and
that's why you see like the blackening and browning, you know,
the and the and the big bubbles in non dread
because it's extremely rapid cooking. It's kind of like pizza making, right,
(15:30):
and there's rapid expansion of the dough that makes these
big bubbles in it and charge the underside and then
it gets pulled off with a hook and then of
course it's delicious. I'm a big fan of non bread.
It makes me wonder what this fourteen thousand year old
bread tastes like. I mean, I wonder if it was
non bread. Probably not quite because I I doubt they were,
you know, putting butter on it or any um. But
(15:54):
but it's fascinating that this discovery is because when you
think about it, it reverses is the order of technological
adaptation that had long been assumed. Like we long thought
that people developed agriculture first, which allowed them to grow
large amounts of grain, and having all this grain led
to the invention of bread and baking. But this discovery
(16:17):
makes it look like the opposite is the case. Instead.
Ancient hunter gatherers probably gathered grain from wild grasses and
figured out how to turn it into bread. Then they
settled down and developed farming to grow the grain. Thousands
of years later. On this model, baking preceded agriculture. You
had bread first and then farming. That is incredible. We
(16:41):
had to think about it now. In researching the origins
of bread, I ended up turning to a wonderful book
by Michael Pollen that is also a wonderful Netflix series
titled Cooked, which I recommend either you know, watch watch
the show. It's fabulous, but also the book is tremendous
as well, and is also like available for a very
reasonable price right now. But he points out that a
(17:04):
whole grain loaf is full of flavor and air, so
it's it's also and it's also so much more than
the sum of its parts. He points out that if
you gave someone the ingredients for bread and they had
to consume them as as is, they'd stuff. But give
them the bread, you know, or there at least the
Promethean knowledge of bread baking and that they will eat
(17:26):
and survive. Um, you know, it's it's again we have
to just come back to We take it for granted,
because it's everywhere, but bread is it's almost like this
neolithic or paleolithic space shuttle, you know, in terms of
of what it does with invention. Um Paullen has an
excellent passage in the book where he he discusses the
invention of bread, and he points out that the pre
(17:47):
bread way of consuming these various grass seeds was to
simply toast them on a fire, or to grind them
between stones and boil them into a very basic porridge,
uh quote. And we should pour it out by the
way that a lot of people throughout history that ate
cereal grains as as as a food stable did eat
them in some kind of porridge form that would kind
(18:07):
have always been made into a bread. A lot of
times they'd be just like boiled in some liquid. Right. Yeah,
so Pollen says quote. The inert mush that resulted might
not have made for inspiring meals, but it was simple
enough to prepare and nutritious enough to eat, providing us
with the energy of starch as well as some protein,
vitamins and minerals. But of course, then you know, at
(18:30):
some point those ancient people began to realize that you
could do something else with this thick gruel, because we
can only assume they got rather tired of it, you know,
as tiresome as it sounds, right, So they found that
you could spread the out the gruel on a hot
cooking stone and make simple unleavened flatbread, or perhaps to
bring back to our example, you know, throw it in
on the side like splatted, like maybe somebody just got
(18:51):
sick of their over thick porridge one day and we're like, like,
screw this, I'm not eating it, and threw it in
there and flow and behold, flatbread was born. But Poullen writes,
and he's talking, he throws out the date six thousand
years ago in ancient Egypt. He says that that roughly
six thousand years ago in ancient Egypt, something happened. Perhaps
someone left a bowl of porridge in a corner of
(19:12):
the kitchen for a few days. Um, you know that
matt might have been what happened, something like that. But
then bubbles began to rise up. Right, the mask grew
like a living thing. Dough was born, and when it
was heated in an oven, it grew larger still, quote,
springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an
area yet stable structure that resembled a sponge, and so
(19:36):
Paullen writes that it was it probably seemed like magic
at the time, with the food increasing threefold and volume. Uh,
you know, you can imagine the fairy tale of this,
like the porridge that was forgotten and then grew threefolds.
You know. Now, of course the expansion is due to
the air, as we've previously discussed. But you know, this,
(19:56):
this invention of bread, this invention of of baking, he says,
constituted quote the world's first food processing industry. And and
I do want to I just want to read one
more quote he has from the book, just summing up
what we've been discussing here. Quote. Most foods, even the
whole hog, are altered versions of nature's already existing animals
(20:17):
and plants, which more or less retain their form after cooking.
But a loaf of bread is something new added to
the world, an edged object, wrestled from the flux of nature,
and specifically from the living, shifting Dionysian swamp that is
dough bread is the Apollonian food. So I love that
(20:39):
just bringing out this into the mythic qualities of this
and the idea again that that bread is an invention.
It is not part of the natural world. It is
a thing that we made and invented out of the
natural world. Bread is order out of chaos. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
we will turn our attention to toast. All right, we're back,
(21:06):
so we've got bread. The next logical step is to
make some toast. Let's discuss how that came about. All right, Well,
first of all, it appears that toast is also a
tradition stretching into the ancient world. We don't know for sure,
but it's probably, I mean, we just have to assume
not much younger a tradition than bread itself, right, because
in a way, toast is just a continuation of the
(21:28):
cooking process of bread by you know, you slice it
and further expose the bread to heat, scorching it, and this,
of course, uh, you know, we do it because it
contributes to changes in both the texture and the taste
of bread. So it further dehydrates the bread and helps
make it crisp, which is useful for some some things
we want. But also the flavor changes or a big
(21:50):
thing going on there. You know, toasting bread causes browning
of the sugars and the amino acids that make up
the natural proteins within within the bread, and this complex
set of chemical reactions all taking place during browning is
collectively known as the Myard reaction, and it's generally why
browned food tastes so good, like different versions of the
(22:12):
same thing are taking place, whether you're toasting bread or
searing steak on a grill. The browning is the evidence
of this huge suite of complex chemical changes that produce
new compounds with interesting flavors and aromas that we associate
with roastinus, toastinus, nuttiness, meetin nous, and all these other
flavors that that are so good when we when we
(22:34):
give food a good browning, but not so much when
we blackened food completely and turn it into burned food,
which tends to yield a kind of bitter charcoally taste. Yes, toast,
good burnt toast. Now, it's not known for sure why
toast was invented, but obviously one candidate explanation seems pretty
promising to me at least for the invention of toast
(22:56):
is that it began like so many other great culinary
techniques like smoking and curing, like pickling, as a method
for extending the life of foods. So we all know this,
right you have you have a loaf of bread in
your house, and the day you get it, especially if
you get it you know, fresh baked, to the day
the day was baked, it's amazing. You've you've got this
freshness window. And the second day maybe it's still okay.
(23:21):
But like it's like a mayfly, It flourishes for a
day or two, and then it declines as the bread
grows stale, and it takes on this unappealing taste and texture.
And here's where toasting comes in. It's a perfect resurrection
method for fresh bread that is no longer fresh. Toast,
you know, toast some less than fresh bread, and it's
a whole new thing, right Yeah, it's a way of
(23:43):
it's sort of bringing it back to life. I can
also imagine that if one were in a particularly frigid climate,
that it would make sense to resurrect your bread that
might not not not only might it be going of
its stale, but it also might be rather cold or
even rock hard, and would need to be reheated is
for comfortable consumption, Yeah, totally. But while so, of course,
(24:06):
of course toasting does remain a good way to resurrect
bread that's fallen beyond its peak of freshness. Of course,
we we toast perfectly fresh bread as well for purely
you know, culinary aesthetic reasons, reasons relating to the way
it feels and tastes and looks in the texture. And
it's just for enjoyment. We just like toast. It's good. Yeah.
One of one of my favorite recipes that again involves
(24:28):
a tomato but also involves toast, is a panzanella salad,
which is which is rather a bread resurrection recipe and
of itself often calling for stale bread, uh, but that
is then soaked in oil and vinegar. And this seems
to date back to at least the sixteen hundreds when uh,
an Italian artist by the name of Bronzino saying it's praises.
(24:50):
But you also find rather recipes that call for like
for for fresh bread that is toasted and the bread
takes on in in in my opinion, a very like
meaty consists. Can see and uh, you know, and I
guess it's because you have you know, these these flavors
coming together. You know, you have some basalt mac you
have some olive oil, you have the tomatoes themselves, and
then the the just the texture of the toast or bread. Yeah, well,
(25:14):
so toasted bread, because it's undergoing the myard reaction to
a degree, it gets that kind of roasty flavor, which
in some ways tastes kind of meaty to us. Then
also if you've got tomatoes in the salad, tomatoes have
a lot of glutamates and that, and that's also something
we associate with the kind of meaty taste. But again,
the end result is like just another level beyond bread,
you know, and the toast just feels that much more
(25:35):
removed from the you know, the original and just grains
that have been collected from these various grasses. Yeah, it's
a wonderful journey through human history. Now, I guess we
should maybe turn to the toaster, because while we have
some clues about the circumstances in which bread and toast
a rose, we don't know who ultimately invented them that,
(25:57):
you know, that that's just in the fog. But we
do have some indications about toasters in history, right, we
know where these came from. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, obviously
there are plenty of just very standard ways you could
toast a piece of bread. Put it on a stick,
leave it on that baking stone, grill it, you know,
put it in one of these ovens that you've constructed,
and so forth. But at least in the early nineteenth
(26:20):
nineteenth century, we begin to see specialized toasting apparatus is
for toasting bread over or adjacent to open flames, And
many of these were pretty straightforward, just a metal framework
in which to brace slices of bread, all at the
end of like a long handle, so you're not burning
your fingers off. And some of some of these hearth
toasters even had a swiveling mechanism so that you could
(26:41):
like toast one side of the bread, then swivel it
around and toast the others. And these methods all work
perfectly well today, just as they worked in their inception.
So why invent a toaster in the modern sense of
the word, Well, it all comes down ultimately to our
busy lives in the kitchen and beyond the kitchen, Because
the beauty of a toaster or a toaster, then is
that it allows us to automate our toast making somewhat
(27:04):
stick the toast in, start the machine, busy yourself with coffee, eggs,
or what have you, and not have to worry as
much about the house burning down in the process. Um,
you know, in a way we're talking about building towards
a toasting automaton or you know, toasting robot. So a
few key features factor into all the of our various
attempts to elevate toasting technology. But the first and most
(27:25):
important was the creation of an electric heating system to
eliminate the need for gas or open flame. Yeah. Now
we kind of take electric heating elements for granted today,
don't we. We don't realize that this was was a
difficult problem at one point. Yeah, it was trickier than
you might imagine, because you need to create a heating element,
you know, something that can be heated up due to
(27:46):
an electric current. But it also it has to come
it has to be able to sustain repeated high temperatures
and not fail. You know, it needs to be able
to heat up, heat back and then cool back down
and up again and back down on and uh. And
so you know, that was something people worked at for
a while in the history of making toast from Hagley
(28:08):
dot Org. The author's point to Albert Marsh's nineteen o
five uh nichrome filament wire with an alloy of nickel
and chromium, being like the key advancement here, it was
both safe and durable when heated by the electric current.
Then in nineteen o six, the first US patent application
was filed for an electric toaster using Marsh's wire, and
(28:31):
this was by George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater
Company of Detroit. And then in nineteen o eight, General
Electric patented the General Electric D twelve toaster and rolled
it out in nineteen o nine, and this one used
Marsh's uh nichrome technology as well. And Gail L. Goudie
has an excellent blog post about this model at the
(28:53):
College of Charleston's Architecture and Art History Club. Uh. It's um,
it's it doesn't look like a toast. It looks like
a porcelain has like a porcelain base in this kind
of tesla coil looking post trapped right on top of it.
Uh and it looks like a torture cage for bread. Yeah,
(29:14):
And Gaudi drives home that this item was a luxury.
It costs four dollars in nineteen o nine, which she
says is roughly a hundred dollars today. So this would
have been this would have been something, uh that the
elite had. I just want to read a quote from
her summary quote. A General Electric advertisement from eight taken
from the Library of Congress, depicts two well dressed women
(29:35):
setting at a table leisurely having breakfast with their D
twelve toaster, complete with a floral design and the ceramic
base setting beside them. Women were the main target for
General Electrics advertisements because they were seen as the consumers
of the household. One major selling point was the ability
to quote get out of the messy kitchen and be
able to join your company in quote the comfortable dining room.
(29:58):
This made the D twelve tote not only a more
practical and efficient way to toast bread, but also a
way to show off to others, so, you know, conspicuous
toast consumption. Yeah, you know. And it's like it's a
way of like, oh, well, we can make bread at
the tape. It's almost like a like a fondue pot
for toast, you know. But it was a hit, and
(30:18):
it proved the first commercially successful electric toaster. But one
of the problems with the D twelve was that you
had to turn the toast yourself. So enter the Copeman
Electric Stove Companies nineteen thirteen or possibly I Whole se
nineteen fifteen. So we may be dealing with patent versus
actual rollout. But this model turned the toast for you,
and it was designed by Lloyd Groff Copeman. Then in
(30:42):
nineteen nineteen Minnesota, Minnesota mechanic named Charles Perkins Strite created
a restaurant grade toaster, and in nineteen one he patented
the automatic pop up toaster. Ah, this is the one
that's in all the movies. Yeah, this was This was
a key advance. But no longer was it merely a
little like a gadget that allows you to toast bread
at your table and like this kind of fonn do manner.
(31:04):
This was a design that times you're toasting to prevent
burnt toast popping it out of the heated interior. When
it was finished. Waters Genter of Minneapolis began selling a
redesigned version in nine and this was called the Toastmaster.
And in this we had a pop up home toaster
that browned both sides at once via timed heating element
(31:25):
with ejection, the modern toaster was born, and really it's
essentially the same design that's widespread today, though this was
much bulkier. It looks huge, Yeah, it does. It looks
like it looks like like a huge toaster on top
of another apparatus. It looks like like its own little oven.
It looks like a toaster on top of a slot machine. Yeah,
now you Now. We could easily spend the rest of
(31:47):
the episode just discussing the various technological improvements, then bridge
the gap between the toastmaster and whatever you have in
your own kitchen. We could also focus on its siblings,
like the toaster oven, which is much much the same principle,
except it's a since a small oven and it's a
lot more versatile. I'm more of a toaster oven kind
of person. Uh. Yeah, you can do a lot more
different kinds of stuff with it. Yeah, that's what we
(32:09):
have in our house. Um. Then there's also the conveyor toaster,
which dates back to ninety eight or so. And is
I'm sure anyone who's ever enjoyed a continental breakfast at
a hotel you've seen this you know, it has a
little conveyor and it it takes the toast on a
little journey that heats it and then drops it out
at the bottom. Uh yeah. Unfortunately, at one time, I
remember it was around some high schoolers who were fooling
(32:31):
around with one of these things, and it's sort of
caught on fire. Oh. I think they were putting stuff
in it. This shouldn't go in. It gets stuck in there.
Usually the only place you encounter it is in you know,
like a continental breakfast situation. But I think the beauty
of this episode is that at this point we returned
to bread itself and consider the way that the toaster
changes bread. And we've already discussed how baking was, you know,
(32:54):
again in Pollen's words, quote world the world's first food
processing industry. And in the nineteenth and twentieth tree this
all continued and we saw what Poullen referred to as
quote the reductive logic of industrial bread baking, because to
feed the needs of the toaster, you need rather standardized
bread slice sizes, and this led to the invention of
(33:14):
machines to pre sliced loafs. So otto Frederick Roy Vetter
is credited with inventing the world's first commercial bread slicing machine,
and this was installed in a Chillicothe, Missouri, at the
Chilicothe Baking Company. And on July seven this when this
thing fired up and began slicing loaves of bread into
(33:37):
regimented slices, uh, you know, pre sale. And this was
two years before Wonderbread started marketing its own pre wrap
pre sliced bread nationwide. Now, one thing that comes about
with this era of you know, the bag sliced bread,
is where people begin to assume the uniformity of bread
as a product. Whereas bread, as we were saying earlier,
(33:58):
is is something with such an amazing diversity of forms
and recipes and flavors. I mean, bread is sort of
half the cooking world, and its diversity reflects that. But
if you go down the bread aisle in the grocery
store and see all the industrial made bread that's all
pretty much the same shape and size, you wouldn't get
that impression. No, no, I mean it. You end up
(34:20):
with this very again regimented uh slice situation. And you know,
generally that's that's a lot of times, that's the bread
we grew up with. Maybe perhaps that's still the bread
you kind of get today. But you know, there have
been some commentators who have really lingered on the sadness
of all of this. And I believe you found out
a wonderful paper that some some of this up. Oh yeah,
(34:40):
it was. It was a paper by a communications scholar
named Arthur asa Berger who was writing about toast as
something that's sort of like emblematic of the sort of
like industrial alienation of the modern world. And it was
a paper just called the Toaster from et cetera orvie
you of general semantics, and published in nine And I
(35:03):
want to read a quote from his From his conclusion here,
Burger writes, Ultimately, the toaster is an apology for the
quality of our bread. It attempts heroically to transform the
semi sweet, characterless, plastic package bread that we have learned
to love into something more palatable and more manageable. Perhaps
(35:24):
our handling this bread and warming it up gives us
a sense that the bread now has a human touch
to it, is not an abstract, almost unreal product. The
toaster represents a heroic attempt to redeem our packaged bread,
to redeem the unredeemable, but the toaster, despite its high
tech functions, is doomed. The continual repetition of Adam and
(35:45):
Eve's fall for an unregenerate bread cannot be saved. Every
piece of toast is a tragedy. I love that, you know,
agree or disagree, But the good news is that they
you can buy bread that wasn't baked by a machine,
and you can toast it in a variety of ways,
essentially using your own hand. I'd i'd encourage everyone to
(36:09):
try that. I'd encourage everyone to at least make some
sort of bread at some point in your life, because
it it allows you to sort of tap into that
feeling of magic that must have accompanied, you know, the
the initial creations, the initial invention of bread. Now, if
you have wanted to bake bread at home, by the way,
but you're like, hey, I don't have one of these
commercial bakery bread ovens, you know, I don't have the equipment. Uh,
(36:32):
there are actually great recipes you can look up online
that just require a Dutch oven inside a normal kind
of oven that you'd have at home to make like
a really good boulangerie style loaf. So I recommend looking
that up. All right, Well, it looks like we need
to take a quick break, but we will be right back.
(36:55):
All right, we're back. So we've talked about the birth
of bread. We've talked about hoasting, We've talked about this
fabulous invention the toaster. We've talked about one kind of toasting,
but then another kind of toasting of what kind of
tough Yes, of course we haven't talked about the toast.
Here is to your health, right, which it's easy to
just assume that there's no connection between the two. I know,
(37:17):
I never really thought about there being a connection between
a a piece of toast and a formal you know, uh,
you know, glassware clinking event at a fine dinner or something,
you know, along those lines. If you had asked me,
I probably would have assumed it was a false cognate,
one of those things that's just like a word that
happens to sound like another word but has unrelated roots. Yeah,
(37:39):
But as it turns out, it looks like there's there
are some firm connections there, and then there's kind of
an argument on both sides. But I was looking looking
at an article, an excellent article on Atlas Obscura's gastro
obscura um section, which is kind of almost like a
subsite that they have which is food related and it's
really good. I think I even wrote a piece for
them a while back. What I said about it is
(38:00):
about Marichino cherries. Marichino cherries. But anyway, this particular pieces
by and You Bank and it was titled Toasting your
Friends once involved actual toast. Okay, convinced me, all right,
So but here's how it goes, as e Bank lays
it out. Basically, there are a few different theories about
where toast comes from, as in like toasting someone. One
(38:21):
relates to a sixteenth century German practice of shouting the
Latin word proceed, meaning may it do you good? But
another is that it ties in with the history of
putting toast in alcohol. That sounds weird. Well, but but
but does it? What? What do you be here? More
specifically toasting with beer or wine that is garnished with bread. Okay,
(38:44):
that somehow beer or wine makes more sense. What I
was imagining was vodka martini like James Bond drinks, except
instead of the little toothpick with an olive in it,
it's just a piece of toast. Well, I'm all up
for some inventive garnishes, and in fact, a few year
is back, I found a cocktail recipe on It was
on the Hendrix Gin website. You know, generally these you know,
(39:06):
big alcohol brands will have recipes on their website, and
Hendrix is is no exception. Uh, And they had a
recipe for a cocktail that I don't think it's hosted
on the current version of the side. But it called
for some sparkling wine. It called for I believe some bitters, uh,
some marmalade I want to say, kind of muddled in
the bottom, some gin, of course, and it was a
(39:29):
really good drink. But it also called for a garnish
of a small piece of toast, which at the time
I was like, well, that's weird, and I'm I'm just
gonna skip that part because I don't really understand it
and I don't want to, like additionally like make toast
for the drink, So you know, I just kind of
skipped over it. I would have probably been into it
had I had it at a restaurant, but I just
(39:49):
hadn't thought about it since until I started reading this article.
So when we get into this idea of beer and
wine combined with toast. It relates to SOPs. Yes, ops
as in as in too like sop up something, And
SOPs were chunks of of sodden toasted bread in a
bowl of warm wine if you were you know, medieval
(40:10):
upper crust uh and a mere high calorie piece of
ale soaked toast if you were part of the ample
underclass at medieval times in medieval Europe. And the author
also adds quote the English even covered apple trees insider
dipped toast as part of an ancient ritual for a
good harvest. So with SOPs were generally talking about white
(40:32):
bread toasted and then flavored with sugar, ginger, or herbs.
And then the British supper and soup even derived from sop.
Apparently milk sop as an insult is also derived from
this word. While sop became less essential to European cuisine,
French onion soup is supposedly a survivor of the custom
(40:53):
French onion soup. Of course, you know, it generally has
like that big piece of bread in there, which I
think is something that either you love it or that
turns you off a little bit, there being like essentially
a big soggy piece of bread in your soup, which
camper you in. I like it. I do think it's
it's definitely a soup that needs to be I like
to eat it right away. I don't think you should
let it completely disintegrate in your soup, right. Well, I
(41:15):
think it's one of those where it helps to have
one of those uh, you know, crustier, chewier kind of
high protein breads, you know, with like a chewy gluten matrix,
that those work better in that kind of thing than
like a you know, a soft, cakey kind of bread. Right.
And of course it's a it's traditionally a neat based soup,
but there are some excellent mushroom based recipes for it
out there, because yeah, usually they would have a beef
(41:37):
broth piece. Yeah, that's generally true though, that that mushrooms
make an excellent substitute, like a vegetarian substitute for beef flavor,
like anything that calls for beef broth or anything beefy.
You can put mushrooms in there, and I think you'll
have more textural differences than taste differences. Actually, yeah, I'll
bring out like an neunami kind of flavoring, right, mommy, mommy,
(42:00):
you know me. Uh yeah, I mean I remember even
like growing up, like occasionally we would have when we
were you know, eating meat as a family, like the
mushroom gravy would be brought out as a way to
enhance the cut of meat. You know. Yeah, so you
know it makes sense that even even in if the
meat is completely gone, the mushroom or mushroom grave you're
some sort of mushroom based of flavoring will do the job.
(42:22):
A great cooking tip if you ever use dried chitaki
mushrooms in your home, uh and you you know, reconstitute
them in hot water to heat them up. Don't just
use the mushrooms and throw out the broth. That broth
that you reconstituted them in is gold. Now you can
like reduce it, you can freeze it, you can use
it in soups and anything. It tastes amazing. Another survivor
(42:45):
of this, uh this SOPs legacy is apparently was s
ale Um. I don't think I know what that is.
You know, it's in the traditional like holiday punch type
type beverage. Here we go whostling that that's sort of
well like taking the punch out or getting punch or
well yeah, kind of like you know, the holiday sharing
(43:05):
of the punch the wall sale tradition, but apparently like
traditionally it also had toast in it. Here here we
go aboozing is what that means? Yes, okay, and then
toasting each other's health became apparently became more of a
fat in the seventeen hundreds, and the name indeed may
derive from the fact that these beverages that people were
toasting with we're often topped with SOPs. It does make
(43:27):
me wonder if if SOPs will ever make a real comeback,
you know, if say, twenty years from now, like the
new trendy restaurant in New York will be all sop space,
you know, because because the other you know, other toast
items have never really gone out of style. I think
I think there has been kind of a resurgence of
of toast in recent years, and avocado toast, but then
(43:50):
also just uh, you know, some chefs kind of like
focusing in on something uh in some cases toast and saying,
all right, what is it about a good slice of
toast that works? And what how can we deconstruct that?
And and and maybe even put some sort of new
twist on it. Oh yeah, now that you mentioned that
there there's at least one kind of hip restaurant in
town here that we go to sometimes. It does it.
It's got like a whole toasts section of itself. It's
(44:13):
just like toasts with you know, it'll have like a
like a salmon spread topping, or like a like a
mushroom and ricotta topping or something. Yeah. I wonder if
this would be interesting to hear from anyone out there,
who is you know, who's who's active in the culinary
world or the mixology world. I would I would love
to know if anybody is attempting to bring back the
(44:34):
toast garnish. Was that Hendricks drink that I saw online?
Was that just kind of a flash in the pan,
or just like a you know, a lone survivor of
the tradition, or is there anybody out there saying, Hey,
we used to put toast in our drinks and we
should do it again. It's essential. Stop trying to make
toast drinks happen, Robert, It's not going to happen. I
(44:56):
don't I don't know. I I want to try a
good one. I want to I want to try an
authentic one. Well, you know what, I can actually imagine
more so than I guess. It would depend on the
consistency of the drink. Like, if it's like an eggnog
kind of thing, you definitely see using toasting that if
it's like a if it's like a more watery, consistency
type drink, I'm having a harder time imagining actually dipping
the toast in it to any good effect, but I
(45:16):
could imagine it would be a nice pairing of aromas.
I mean, there are some drinks that call for just
like scenting a glass with an aroma. Like sometimes people
will make a drink where they smoke the glass, you know,
like burn aboard and put the glass on it, and
then there's smoke on the glass that gives it this
kind of scent, and then they add the drink to
the glass. I could see a similar thing happening with toast,
because toast is such a pleasant aroma that smell might
(45:39):
pair well with some types of drinks. I don't I
don't know with what liquors, but you know, you can
imagine that. Yeah, well, maybe we can get to the
point where it's like kind of like the bread bowl
that you have for for spinach dips. Sometimes like the
bread chalice, the bread bowl is actually the ultimate stop
that stopped to the stream. Right whoever thought that up
(46:03):
as a genius? Huh, yeah, this is We really only
scratched the surface on like bread traditions and all that
we said. You know, we didn't devote the whole episode.
You just bread. And every culture has its own spin
on particular uses of bread. Uh, you know the things
certainly you stick into bread. Basically there's a hot pocket
of some form and just about every culture. Uh and uh,
(46:25):
you know we don't we don't have time to go
into all of those today. But but bread is an
important part of of human culture, of human history and uh,
you know, even though it's just our everyday sustenance most
of the time, we should stop and appreciate this fabulous invention,
well said Robert. All right. If you would like to
(46:45):
check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to
invention pod dot com. And if you want to support
the show, really the best thing you can do is
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to do so, and make sure you have subscribed. Huge
thanks to our audio producers for this episode O Seth
Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like to
get in touch with us to let us know feedback
(47:05):
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is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And uh, you know this episode is titled
Bread Toast Toasters because we're going to take you on
an odyssey of human invention. Oh. I never thought about
this as an odyssey, but it really is one spanning generations.
(00:25):
It's like two thousand one of space Odyssey, it is.
But of course the middle part of that is toast.
So I just wanted to take a second for us
artist to consider the slice of toast a thing that,
when done right, is absolutely exquisite in its own right,
but also serves as an excellent base for so many
other fine taste sensations. Wouldn't you agree? Oh? I absolutely would.
(00:46):
I there is a food combination that I don't know
if it can be topped. It might especially be a
Southeast United States kind of thing. But we're in tomato
season right now, you know, it's July, especially getting in
to August. That's like peak tomato season. And I just
want to say, as a message to you young folks
out there, if if you have never tried like a
(01:09):
delicious like thick, juicy, vine ripened you know, farmers or
garden tomato. You've only had tomatoes from the grocery store.
You do not understand what a tomato tastes like like.
It is not just better to get a good from
you know, summer tomato from a farmer or a garden.
(01:30):
It's a completely different food, yea. And sometimes it looks
like a different different species altogether, you know, because it
will be like an organic tomato you've had a farmer's
market will sometimes be kind of like weirdly grotesquely bloated
looking and have lines on it. It's not as pristine
as your you know, your grocery store tomato, but that
(01:50):
the taste experiences is beyond yes. And so if you
want to have the most perfect tomato experience, there are
a lot of ways people do it. People make a
crazy salad it or just eat it, you know, sliced
with salt and pepper or something like that. But here
here's something i'd recommend. Get some good bread, toast the bread,
you know, lightly toasted, a little bit of mayonnaise, and
(02:11):
fresh sliced summer tomatoes. That is the best meal you
will ever have in your entire life. Oh, I believe it. Yeah,
we've we've been doing a lot of these. We don't
do bacon anymore, but we've basically been doing b lts,
but with sausage standing in for the bacon. And it's
but with the with really good tomatoes and it's fabulous.
But even without tomatoes, I mean, think of all the
(02:33):
things that toast is great with. I mean, you can
put some marmalade, some butter on toast and that's a
home run. Avocado toast has been a huge hit in
recent years, and because for a great reason it is wonderful.
Avocado toast is basically just another form of buttered toast,
because avocado is like fruit butter. Yeah, but it's exquisite tasting.
(02:55):
I'm also reminded of toad in the hole of your head.
Toad in the hole, you cut a hole out of
the toast, you to agon it. Yeah, yeah, it's great,
it's it's amazing. Yeah. So we're gonna before we get
back to toast and what toast is, we should talk
about what comes before toast, and eventually we'll get into
what comes before that. But let's talk a little bit
about the other great wonder one of the greatest inventions
(03:18):
the humanity has ever devised, that being bread itself, right,
and it's possible to argue that bread is one of
the inventions that made human civilization. It's sort of a
culinary chemistry project because it's not something you find in nature.
Bread is a thing that certainly had to be invented,
(03:39):
and it's this thing that turned the seeds of hardy
grass plants into a scalable staple food that could provide
lots of calories to feed settled populations and and big
settled populations. And before the cultivation of grain crops, most
of the time humans wouldn't be able to grow and
store enough food survive in large numbers in one place.
(04:02):
Like in settled cities, you have to keep moving around
and constantly foraging for food through the hunting of animals
or the gathering of wild plants. The main strain of
thinking about the origins of cities and settled human population
is the cultivation of grasses. Yielding grain crops massively increase
the efficiency of human food production, so you can get
(04:24):
like way more stores of ready calories with less work,
and the thinking usually goes that this is also what
made possible the diversifying of human labor. Since not everybody
had to be involved in getting food all of the time,
more people could be able to spend more of their
time on other types of projects, so crafts like pottery
(04:45):
and weaving, and the creation of tools and weapons and
other technologies, the education of children, the creation of literature
and music, religious rights and duties, and all these other
things that we come to associate with human technology and culture.
And there's st only a case to be made that
cereal crops and the bread that was made with them
played a huge role in making all this possible that
(05:07):
led to the modern world. Now. As for bread itself,
of course, there are a bazillion different ways to make bread, right.
The most essential components, uh too. Pretty much all bread
recipes are water and a flower based on some type
of grain from a grass plant like wheat. So to
make wheat flour, of course, you you've got to take
(05:27):
the fruiting body of the wheat plant, which is the
kernel or the seed, and the wheat plant. By the way,
if you've never actually looked up close at the part
of the wheat that you eat, you know wheat is
a grass. It's like this huge, tall grass, and it's
got this thing on the end that's got the seeds,
and it looks kind of like a furry rattlesnake tail
at the top of the stall. So it's got all
these rattlesnake tails, and you've got to take those rattlesnake
(05:49):
tails off, get the seeds out of them, and then
process those seeds and grind them into a powder. And
of course that powder is the flour. And then to
turn the flour into bread, you have to hydrate it
with water. And if this is like a flat or
unleavened bread, you can just add any other seasonings you
want and bake it as is in an oven or
on a hot surface, and this will tend to produce,
(06:10):
of course, a relatively like flat, chewy bread, like kind
of like a peda or like a tortilla. But the
most common type of bread we're familiar with, and the
kind we think of when we're making toast, is of
course bread that has some kind of leavening, which is
an agent that will create gas bubbles inside the dough
that cause it to rise. And these bubbles, of course
increase the volume of the dough they make it rise,
(06:32):
but they also give the bread a softer texture. And
in the modern world, we've got tons of different kind
of ways of getting bubbles into bread. We've got chemical
agents like baking powder, baking soda, and they create gas
bubbles through chemical reactions that happen after the substances are
added to the dough. But you can also create a
kind of forced mechanical leavening just by like incorporating something
(06:54):
like whipped egg whites, where like the air whipped into
the egg whites forms gas bulls that expand when you
cook it. But of course, the more traditional method of
levining is to use biological agents like yeast. And here
for for listeners of invention and stuff to blow your mind,
we bring things back to the fungal allegiance is this
(07:14):
is zug timoy here, Yeah, this is the Kingdom of
zug awesome. Yeah, zugtimoy comes in yet again with so
many of our best inventions. There's zug timoy derive. So yeast,
of course, is a type of single celled fungal microorganism
found all throughout nature and even in and on our
own bodies. Uh. And the strain most often used today
(07:35):
is Baker's yeast, which is the fungal species Scara micey
serivsy uh So, baker's east actually also serves as the
fermentation agent in the making of beer and wine. So
like when yeast consume carbohydrates, the yeast produced waste products.
Those waste products include C O two, which is the
gas that makes bread rise. But they also include ethanol,
(07:58):
which is alcohol, which of course that's what adds the
alcohol content to beer in wine when it for mints.
And I do think it's generally true that that uh,
you know, bread made with yeast is alcoholic to a
small extent. It's not alcoholic enough to get you drunk,
but but it's but it's there, yeah, yeah, uh and
is of course, there's so many cultural variations of bread
(08:19):
all around the world, using different grains to make the flour.
Like the different grains include like oats or rye, barley, millet, maize, sorghum.
And you've got all the different cooking methods, different leavening agents,
different seasonings. It's an entire world of cuisine. I mean,
I think there's a good reason that you've got like
cooking and baking, you know, like baking is it's not
(08:41):
just bread, is you know, pastries and stuff too, but
like this whole other sort of half of the cooking
world is focused on bread like things. And is it
any wonder that some of the bread like things end
up taking on magical or spiritual potency be it you know,
be it as part of say, uh you know Western
Chris tradition of of taking holy communion or or certainly
(09:04):
examples from aso American culture where uh where where the
the use of maize in in food products, you know,
and in some sort of a flatbread and all it
was considered the you know, the the body of a god.
It was something that you ate in silence because you
were partaking of something holy. Oh wow, Well there is
something mystical about bread, because I think I was hinting
(09:25):
at this a minute ago. But you know, it's not
apparent in nature. Bread is something that was truly an invention.
It's not like something you discovered that was already out
there waiting. Like you had to put together a bunch
of different uh like steps in this process. You know,
you had to get the seeds from these grasses, and
(09:45):
you had to grind them up into powder, and you
had to get that powder wet and make a dough
out of it, and if it's leavened bread, you had
to add some kind of leavening agent to make it
rise or allow you know, natural yeast to get into it.
The would let it rise, and then you had to
bake it at the right temperature and all is just like,
it's not something that's obvious, So you have to wonder
who invented this, Like where did all this knowledge and
(10:08):
process come from? Well, let's talk about it. Unfortunately, it's
another one of those that is that is lost to history, right,
there's no known inventor of bread. It's one of these
great world changing inventions like the wheel that we can
get some clues about, but which, you know, the the
ultimate origin vanishes into prehistory with no single point from
(10:29):
which all of it comes. But we do have some
general knowledge about the origins of bread and bread like products.
So for a long time, it was believed, based on
artistic and archaeological evidence, that bread emerged as a human
invention roughly ten thousand years ago, and this would be
during the Neolithic period, meaning the last part of the
(10:50):
Stone Age, and it would have been in a place
called the Fertile Crescent now the Fertile Crescent is this
sickle shaped expanse of arable land is land where you
can grow crops stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean over into Mesopotamia,
and so from west to east. It sort of starts
down in the Nile River valley in Egypt, and then
(11:10):
it travels up along the Eastern Mediterranean coast through like Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria,
and it goes up through southern Turkey, and then it
goes back down through Mesopotamia through a rock in parts
of Iran. And the first wheat crops that were domesticated
in in the Fertile Crescent to make the earliest bread
during the Neolithic Revolution would have been ancestral grasses like
(11:35):
m air wheat which is e M M E R
M R wheat or iron corn wheat. These are grasses
that they are. They're basically other strains of wheat, kind
of like the wheat we we grow today, which is
just known as common wheat. And I think it's not
a it's not a coincidence that this is where many
of the world's oldest and earliest civilizations arose, meaning that
(11:55):
even though there were people all over the world. These
were the places where people first started settling down in
one place, making cities with big populations and diversified economies.
And these cities had to be supported by grain agriculture,
and a lot of that grain was of course used
to make bread and and this has sort of been
the story for a long time, but really interestingly, just
(12:17):
in the past couple of years, it's been revealed that
at least some humans were making bread thousands of years
before this Neolithic agricultural revolution, before all the farming in
the Fertile Crescent started. So the papering question here talking
about this discovery was published in P and A s
(12:37):
in eighteen by Ammia ranzoteg we at All And uh So,
basically the story goes like this. A few years ago,
there's this archaeobotanist, somebody who studies ancient plants named uh
Amaya iran's oteg we I hope I'm saying that right,
uh And she was studying ancient human campsites in Jordan's
(12:57):
and specifically she was looking at an excavator did cooking
site from about fourteen thousand years ago, and this would
have been a camp of people known as the New Tuffians,
who were a culture of hunter gatherers who lived in
this area in the time between the Paleolithic, the Old
Stone Age, and the Neolithic. The more recent Stone Age
(13:18):
between these two technology regimes would have been roughly four
thousand years before settled agriculture started to take over, before
we believed previously that humans invented bread. And then the
Natufians survived on a hunter gatherer basis. They did a
lot of hunting, and their fire pits and food waste
sites were full of bones of wild animals that have
(13:40):
been killed during hunts and eton But at this particular site,
Aronzo teg we also found charred remains of some kind
of plant matter, and so I was reading about how
what she did. She took it to a colleague named
Lara Gonzalez Cartero at University College London and they discovered
these charred food remains were breadcrumbs. These hunter gatherers were
(14:05):
making some form of bread thousands of years before we
previously assumed bread had been invented. Now, the flower used
in this ancient bread had two main ingredients. It was
in corn wheat, which is again it's a wild strain
of wheat grass and then it was the roots of
club rush tubers, which is a type of flower um,
(14:26):
and then it was a lot. There was some other
things in there also, like some spices like mustard and
other trace ingredients like barley, and the researchers think this
dough would have been made to stick to the hot
stone walls lining fire pits. I was reading an NPR
article describing the discovery and h it compared it to
the way that Indian non bread is made to stick
(14:48):
to the walls of a tendur oven. I don't know
if you've ever seen how that's made. There's like, no,
I've never seen this. I just always assumed it was
put in their flat like a pizza. No, there's like
so there's like this vertical hollow oven. It's got the
you know, this fire at the bottom gets extremely hot
and then it's got the walls all around the sides.
And if you see the traditional way or I don't
(15:08):
know if it's the traditional way, at least the way
a lot of like Indian restaurants and Indian kitchens will
make the non bread is they get the dough and
the dough sort of goes on a hook and then
the hook gets uh, the dough gets flung up against
the wall of the oven, which is extremely hot, and
that's why you see like the blackening and browning, you know,
the and the and the big bubbles in non dread
because it's extremely rapid cooking. It's kind of like pizza making, right,
(15:30):
and there's rapid expansion of the dough that makes these
big bubbles in it and charge the underside and then
it gets pulled off with a hook and then of
course it's delicious. I'm a big fan of non bread.
It makes me wonder what this fourteen thousand year old
bread tastes like. I mean, I wonder if it was
non bread. Probably not quite because I I doubt they were,
you know, putting butter on it or any um. But
(15:54):
but it's fascinating that this discovery is because when you
think about it, it reverses is the order of technological
adaptation that had long been assumed. Like we long thought
that people developed agriculture first, which allowed them to grow
large amounts of grain, and having all this grain led
to the invention of bread and baking. But this discovery
(16:17):
makes it look like the opposite is the case. Instead.
Ancient hunter gatherers probably gathered grain from wild grasses and
figured out how to turn it into bread. Then they
settled down and developed farming to grow the grain. Thousands
of years later. On this model, baking preceded agriculture. You
had bread first and then farming. That is incredible. We
(16:41):
had to think about it now. In researching the origins
of bread, I ended up turning to a wonderful book
by Michael Pollen that is also a wonderful Netflix series
titled Cooked, which I recommend either you know, watch watch
the show. It's fabulous, but also the book is tremendous
as well, and is also like available for a very
reasonable price right now. But he points out that a
(17:04):
whole grain loaf is full of flavor and air, so
it's it's also and it's also so much more than
the sum of its parts. He points out that if
you gave someone the ingredients for bread and they had
to consume them as as is, they'd stuff. But give
them the bread, you know, or there at least the
Promethean knowledge of bread baking and that they will eat
(17:26):
and survive. Um, you know, it's it's again we have
to just come back to We take it for granted,
because it's everywhere, but bread is it's almost like this
neolithic or paleolithic space shuttle, you know, in terms of
of what it does with invention. Um Paullen has an
excellent passage in the book where he he discusses the
invention of bread, and he points out that the pre
(17:47):
bread way of consuming these various grass seeds was to
simply toast them on a fire, or to grind them
between stones and boil them into a very basic porridge,
uh quote. And we should pour it out by the
way that a lot of people throughout history that ate
cereal grains as as as a food stable did eat
them in some kind of porridge form that would kind
(18:07):
have always been made into a bread. A lot of
times they'd be just like boiled in some liquid. Right. Yeah,
so Pollen says quote. The inert mush that resulted might
not have made for inspiring meals, but it was simple
enough to prepare and nutritious enough to eat, providing us
with the energy of starch as well as some protein,
vitamins and minerals. But of course, then you know, at
(18:30):
some point those ancient people began to realize that you
could do something else with this thick gruel, because we
can only assume they got rather tired of it, you know,
as tiresome as it sounds, right, So they found that
you could spread the out the gruel on a hot
cooking stone and make simple unleavened flatbread, or perhaps to
bring back to our example, you know, throw it in
on the side like splatted, like maybe somebody just got
(18:51):
sick of their over thick porridge one day and we're like, like,
screw this, I'm not eating it, and threw it in
there and flow and behold, flatbread was born. But Poullen writes,
and he's talking, he throws out the date six thousand
years ago in ancient Egypt. He says that that roughly
six thousand years ago in ancient Egypt, something happened. Perhaps
someone left a bowl of porridge in a corner of
(19:12):
the kitchen for a few days. Um, you know that
matt might have been what happened, something like that. But
then bubbles began to rise up. Right, the mask grew
like a living thing. Dough was born, and when it
was heated in an oven, it grew larger still, quote,
springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an
area yet stable structure that resembled a sponge, and so
(19:36):
Paullen writes that it was it probably seemed like magic
at the time, with the food increasing threefold and volume. Uh,
you know, you can imagine the fairy tale of this,
like the porridge that was forgotten and then grew threefolds.
You know. Now, of course the expansion is due to
the air, as we've previously discussed. But you know, this,
(19:56):
this invention of bread, this invention of of baking, he says,
constituted quote the world's first food processing industry. And and
I do want to I just want to read one
more quote he has from the book, just summing up
what we've been discussing here. Quote. Most foods, even the
whole hog, are altered versions of nature's already existing animals
(20:17):
and plants, which more or less retain their form after cooking.
But a loaf of bread is something new added to
the world, an edged object, wrestled from the flux of nature,
and specifically from the living, shifting Dionysian swamp that is
dough bread is the Apollonian food. So I love that
(20:39):
just bringing out this into the mythic qualities of this
and the idea again that that bread is an invention.
It is not part of the natural world. It is
a thing that we made and invented out of the
natural world. Bread is order out of chaos. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back,
we will turn our attention to toast. All right, we're back,
(21:06):
so we've got bread. The next logical step is to
make some toast. Let's discuss how that came about. All right, Well,
first of all, it appears that toast is also a
tradition stretching into the ancient world. We don't know for sure,
but it's probably, I mean, we just have to assume
not much younger a tradition than bread itself, right, because
in a way, toast is just a continuation of the
(21:28):
cooking process of bread by you know, you slice it
and further expose the bread to heat, scorching it, and this,
of course, uh, you know, we do it because it
contributes to changes in both the texture and the taste
of bread. So it further dehydrates the bread and helps
make it crisp, which is useful for some some things
we want. But also the flavor changes or a big
(21:50):
thing going on there. You know, toasting bread causes browning
of the sugars and the amino acids that make up
the natural proteins within within the bread, and this complex
set of chemical reactions all taking place during browning is
collectively known as the Myard reaction, and it's generally why
browned food tastes so good, like different versions of the
(22:12):
same thing are taking place, whether you're toasting bread or
searing steak on a grill. The browning is the evidence
of this huge suite of complex chemical changes that produce
new compounds with interesting flavors and aromas that we associate
with roastinus, toastinus, nuttiness, meetin nous, and all these other
flavors that that are so good when we when we
(22:34):
give food a good browning, but not so much when
we blackened food completely and turn it into burned food,
which tends to yield a kind of bitter charcoally taste. Yes, toast,
good burnt toast. Now, it's not known for sure why
toast was invented, but obviously one candidate explanation seems pretty
promising to me at least for the invention of toast
(22:56):
is that it began like so many other great culinary
techniques like smoking and curing, like pickling, as a method
for extending the life of foods. So we all know this,
right you have you have a loaf of bread in
your house, and the day you get it, especially if
you get it you know, fresh baked, to the day
the day was baked, it's amazing. You've you've got this
freshness window. And the second day maybe it's still okay.
(23:21):
But like it's like a mayfly, It flourishes for a
day or two, and then it declines as the bread
grows stale, and it takes on this unappealing taste and texture.
And here's where toasting comes in. It's a perfect resurrection
method for fresh bread that is no longer fresh. Toast,
you know, toast some less than fresh bread, and it's
a whole new thing, right Yeah, it's a way of
(23:43):
it's sort of bringing it back to life. I can
also imagine that if one were in a particularly frigid climate,
that it would make sense to resurrect your bread that
might not not not only might it be going of
its stale, but it also might be rather cold or
even rock hard, and would need to be reheated is
for comfortable consumption, Yeah, totally. But while so, of course,
(24:06):
of course toasting does remain a good way to resurrect
bread that's fallen beyond its peak of freshness. Of course,
we we toast perfectly fresh bread as well for purely
you know, culinary aesthetic reasons, reasons relating to the way
it feels and tastes and looks in the texture. And
it's just for enjoyment. We just like toast. It's good. Yeah.
One of one of my favorite recipes that again involves
(24:28):
a tomato but also involves toast, is a panzanella salad,
which is which is rather a bread resurrection recipe and
of itself often calling for stale bread, uh, but that
is then soaked in oil and vinegar. And this seems
to date back to at least the sixteen hundreds when uh,
an Italian artist by the name of Bronzino saying it's praises.
(24:50):
But you also find rather recipes that call for like
for for fresh bread that is toasted and the bread
takes on in in in my opinion, a very like
meaty consists. Can see and uh, you know, and I
guess it's because you have you know, these these flavors
coming together. You know, you have some basalt mac you
have some olive oil, you have the tomatoes themselves, and
then the the just the texture of the toast or bread. Yeah, well,
(25:14):
so toasted bread, because it's undergoing the myard reaction to
a degree, it gets that kind of roasty flavor, which
in some ways tastes kind of meaty to us. Then
also if you've got tomatoes in the salad, tomatoes have
a lot of glutamates and that, and that's also something
we associate with the kind of meaty taste. But again,
the end result is like just another level beyond bread,
you know, and the toast just feels that much more
(25:35):
removed from the you know, the original and just grains
that have been collected from these various grasses. Yeah, it's
a wonderful journey through human history. Now, I guess we
should maybe turn to the toaster, because while we have
some clues about the circumstances in which bread and toast
a rose, we don't know who ultimately invented them that,
(25:57):
you know, that that's just in the fog. But we
do have some indications about toasters in history, right, we
know where these came from. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, obviously
there are plenty of just very standard ways you could
toast a piece of bread. Put it on a stick,
leave it on that baking stone, grill it, you know,
put it in one of these ovens that you've constructed,
and so forth. But at least in the early nineteenth
(26:20):
nineteenth century, we begin to see specialized toasting apparatus is
for toasting bread over or adjacent to open flames, And
many of these were pretty straightforward, just a metal framework
in which to brace slices of bread, all at the
end of like a long handle, so you're not burning
your fingers off. And some of some of these hearth
toasters even had a swiveling mechanism so that you could
(26:41):
like toast one side of the bread, then swivel it
around and toast the others. And these methods all work
perfectly well today, just as they worked in their inception.
So why invent a toaster in the modern sense of
the word, Well, it all comes down ultimately to our
busy lives in the kitchen and beyond the kitchen, Because
the beauty of a toaster or a toaster, then is
that it allows us to automate our toast making somewhat
(27:04):
stick the toast in, start the machine, busy yourself with coffee, eggs,
or what have you, and not have to worry as
much about the house burning down in the process. Um,
you know, in a way we're talking about building towards
a toasting automaton or you know, toasting robot. So a
few key features factor into all the of our various
attempts to elevate toasting technology. But the first and most
(27:25):
important was the creation of an electric heating system to
eliminate the need for gas or open flame. Yeah. Now
we kind of take electric heating elements for granted today,
don't we. We don't realize that this was was a
difficult problem at one point. Yeah, it was trickier than
you might imagine, because you need to create a heating element,
you know, something that can be heated up due to
(27:46):
an electric current. But it also it has to come
it has to be able to sustain repeated high temperatures
and not fail. You know, it needs to be able
to heat up, heat back and then cool back down
and up again and back down on and uh. And
so you know, that was something people worked at for
a while in the history of making toast from Hagley
(28:08):
dot Org. The author's point to Albert Marsh's nineteen o
five uh nichrome filament wire with an alloy of nickel
and chromium, being like the key advancement here, it was
both safe and durable when heated by the electric current.
Then in nineteen o six, the first US patent application
was filed for an electric toaster using Marsh's wire, and
(28:31):
this was by George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater
Company of Detroit. And then in nineteen o eight, General
Electric patented the General Electric D twelve toaster and rolled
it out in nineteen o nine, and this one used
Marsh's uh nichrome technology as well. And Gail L. Goudie
has an excellent blog post about this model at the
(28:53):
College of Charleston's Architecture and Art History Club. Uh. It's um,
it's it doesn't look like a toast. It looks like
a porcelain has like a porcelain base in this kind
of tesla coil looking post trapped right on top of it.
Uh and it looks like a torture cage for bread. Yeah,
(29:14):
And Gaudi drives home that this item was a luxury.
It costs four dollars in nineteen o nine, which she
says is roughly a hundred dollars today. So this would
have been this would have been something, uh that the
elite had. I just want to read a quote from
her summary quote. A General Electric advertisement from eight taken
from the Library of Congress, depicts two well dressed women
(29:35):
setting at a table leisurely having breakfast with their D
twelve toaster, complete with a floral design and the ceramic
base setting beside them. Women were the main target for
General Electrics advertisements because they were seen as the consumers
of the household. One major selling point was the ability
to quote get out of the messy kitchen and be
able to join your company in quote the comfortable dining room.
(29:58):
This made the D twelve tote not only a more
practical and efficient way to toast bread, but also a
way to show off to others, so, you know, conspicuous
toast consumption. Yeah, you know. And it's like it's a
way of like, oh, well, we can make bread at
the tape. It's almost like a like a fondue pot
for toast, you know. But it was a hit, and
(30:18):
it proved the first commercially successful electric toaster. But one
of the problems with the D twelve was that you
had to turn the toast yourself. So enter the Copeman
Electric Stove Companies nineteen thirteen or possibly I Whole se
nineteen fifteen. So we may be dealing with patent versus
actual rollout. But this model turned the toast for you,
and it was designed by Lloyd Groff Copeman. Then in
(30:42):
nineteen nineteen Minnesota, Minnesota mechanic named Charles Perkins Strite created
a restaurant grade toaster, and in nineteen one he patented
the automatic pop up toaster. Ah, this is the one
that's in all the movies. Yeah, this was This was
a key advance. But no longer was it merely a
little like a gadget that allows you to toast bread
at your table and like this kind of fonn do manner.
(31:04):
This was a design that times you're toasting to prevent
burnt toast popping it out of the heated interior. When
it was finished. Waters Genter of Minneapolis began selling a
redesigned version in nine and this was called the Toastmaster.
And in this we had a pop up home toaster
that browned both sides at once via timed heating element
(31:25):
with ejection, the modern toaster was born, and really it's
essentially the same design that's widespread today, though this was
much bulkier. It looks huge, Yeah, it does. It looks
like it looks like like a huge toaster on top
of another apparatus. It looks like like its own little oven.
It looks like a toaster on top of a slot machine. Yeah,
now you Now. We could easily spend the rest of
(31:47):
the episode just discussing the various technological improvements, then bridge
the gap between the toastmaster and whatever you have in
your own kitchen. We could also focus on its siblings,
like the toaster oven, which is much much the same principle,
except it's a since a small oven and it's a
lot more versatile. I'm more of a toaster oven kind
of person. Uh. Yeah, you can do a lot more
different kinds of stuff with it. Yeah, that's what we
(32:09):
have in our house. Um. Then there's also the conveyor toaster,
which dates back to ninety eight or so. And is
I'm sure anyone who's ever enjoyed a continental breakfast at
a hotel you've seen this you know, it has a
little conveyor and it it takes the toast on a
little journey that heats it and then drops it out
at the bottom. Uh yeah. Unfortunately, at one time, I
remember it was around some high schoolers who were fooling
(32:31):
around with one of these things, and it's sort of
caught on fire. Oh. I think they were putting stuff
in it. This shouldn't go in. It gets stuck in there.
Usually the only place you encounter it is in you know,
like a continental breakfast situation. But I think the beauty
of this episode is that at this point we returned
to bread itself and consider the way that the toaster
changes bread. And we've already discussed how baking was, you know,
(32:54):
again in Pollen's words, quote world the world's first food
processing industry. And in the nineteenth and twentieth tree this
all continued and we saw what Poullen referred to as
quote the reductive logic of industrial bread baking, because to
feed the needs of the toaster, you need rather standardized
bread slice sizes, and this led to the invention of
(33:14):
machines to pre sliced loafs. So otto Frederick Roy Vetter
is credited with inventing the world's first commercial bread slicing machine,
and this was installed in a Chillicothe, Missouri, at the
Chilicothe Baking Company. And on July seven this when this
thing fired up and began slicing loaves of bread into
(33:37):
regimented slices, uh, you know, pre sale. And this was
two years before Wonderbread started marketing its own pre wrap
pre sliced bread nationwide. Now, one thing that comes about
with this era of you know, the bag sliced bread,
is where people begin to assume the uniformity of bread
as a product. Whereas bread, as we were saying earlier,
(33:58):
is is something with such an amazing diversity of forms
and recipes and flavors. I mean, bread is sort of
half the cooking world, and its diversity reflects that. But
if you go down the bread aisle in the grocery
store and see all the industrial made bread that's all
pretty much the same shape and size, you wouldn't get
that impression. No, no, I mean it. You end up
(34:20):
with this very again regimented uh slice situation. And you know,
generally that's that's a lot of times, that's the bread
we grew up with. Maybe perhaps that's still the bread
you kind of get today. But you know, there have
been some commentators who have really lingered on the sadness
of all of this. And I believe you found out
a wonderful paper that some some of this up. Oh yeah,
(34:40):
it was. It was a paper by a communications scholar
named Arthur asa Berger who was writing about toast as
something that's sort of like emblematic of the sort of
like industrial alienation of the modern world. And it was
a paper just called the Toaster from et cetera orvie
you of general semantics, and published in nine And I
(35:03):
want to read a quote from his From his conclusion here,
Burger writes, Ultimately, the toaster is an apology for the
quality of our bread. It attempts heroically to transform the
semi sweet, characterless, plastic package bread that we have learned
to love into something more palatable and more manageable. Perhaps
(35:24):
our handling this bread and warming it up gives us
a sense that the bread now has a human touch
to it, is not an abstract, almost unreal product. The
toaster represents a heroic attempt to redeem our packaged bread,
to redeem the unredeemable, but the toaster, despite its high
tech functions, is doomed. The continual repetition of Adam and
(35:45):
Eve's fall for an unregenerate bread cannot be saved. Every
piece of toast is a tragedy. I love that, you know,
agree or disagree, But the good news is that they
you can buy bread that wasn't baked by a machine,
and you can toast it in a variety of ways,
essentially using your own hand. I'd i'd encourage everyone to
(36:09):
try that. I'd encourage everyone to at least make some
sort of bread at some point in your life, because
it it allows you to sort of tap into that
feeling of magic that must have accompanied, you know, the
the initial creations, the initial invention of bread. Now, if
you have wanted to bake bread at home, by the way,
but you're like, hey, I don't have one of these
commercial bakery bread ovens, you know, I don't have the equipment. Uh,
(36:32):
there are actually great recipes you can look up online
that just require a Dutch oven inside a normal kind
of oven that you'd have at home to make like
a really good boulangerie style loaf. So I recommend looking
that up. All right, Well, it looks like we need
to take a quick break, but we will be right back.
(36:55):
All right, we're back. So we've talked about the birth
of bread. We've talked about hoasting, We've talked about this
fabulous invention the toaster. We've talked about one kind of toasting,
but then another kind of toasting of what kind of
tough Yes, of course we haven't talked about the toast.
Here is to your health, right, which it's easy to
just assume that there's no connection between the two. I know,
(37:17):
I never really thought about there being a connection between
a a piece of toast and a formal you know, uh,
you know, glassware clinking event at a fine dinner or something,
you know, along those lines. If you had asked me,
I probably would have assumed it was a false cognate,
one of those things that's just like a word that
happens to sound like another word but has unrelated roots. Yeah,
(37:39):
But as it turns out, it looks like there's there
are some firm connections there, and then there's kind of
an argument on both sides. But I was looking looking
at an article, an excellent article on Atlas Obscura's gastro
obscura um section, which is kind of almost like a
subsite that they have which is food related and it's
really good. I think I even wrote a piece for
them a while back. What I said about it is
(38:00):
about Marichino cherries. Marichino cherries. But anyway, this particular pieces
by and You Bank and it was titled Toasting your
Friends once involved actual toast. Okay, convinced me, all right,
So but here's how it goes, as e Bank lays
it out. Basically, there are a few different theories about
where toast comes from, as in like toasting someone. One
(38:21):
relates to a sixteenth century German practice of shouting the
Latin word proceed, meaning may it do you good? But
another is that it ties in with the history of
putting toast in alcohol. That sounds weird. Well, but but
but does it? What? What do you be here? More
specifically toasting with beer or wine that is garnished with bread. Okay,
(38:44):
that somehow beer or wine makes more sense. What I
was imagining was vodka martini like James Bond drinks, except
instead of the little toothpick with an olive in it,
it's just a piece of toast. Well, I'm all up
for some inventive garnishes, and in fact, a few year
is back, I found a cocktail recipe on It was
on the Hendrix Gin website. You know, generally these you know,
(39:06):
big alcohol brands will have recipes on their website, and
Hendrix is is no exception. Uh, And they had a
recipe for a cocktail that I don't think it's hosted
on the current version of the side. But it called
for some sparkling wine. It called for I believe some bitters, uh,
some marmalade I want to say, kind of muddled in
the bottom, some gin, of course, and it was a
(39:29):
really good drink. But it also called for a garnish
of a small piece of toast, which at the time
I was like, well, that's weird, and I'm I'm just
gonna skip that part because I don't really understand it
and I don't want to, like additionally like make toast
for the drink, So you know, I just kind of
skipped over it. I would have probably been into it
had I had it at a restaurant, but I just
(39:49):
hadn't thought about it since until I started reading this article.
So when we get into this idea of beer and
wine combined with toast. It relates to SOPs. Yes, ops
as in as in too like sop up something, And
SOPs were chunks of of sodden toasted bread in a
bowl of warm wine if you were you know, medieval
(40:10):
upper crust uh and a mere high calorie piece of
ale soaked toast if you were part of the ample
underclass at medieval times in medieval Europe. And the author
also adds quote the English even covered apple trees insider
dipped toast as part of an ancient ritual for a
good harvest. So with SOPs were generally talking about white
(40:32):
bread toasted and then flavored with sugar, ginger, or herbs.
And then the British supper and soup even derived from sop.
Apparently milk sop as an insult is also derived from
this word. While sop became less essential to European cuisine,
French onion soup is supposedly a survivor of the custom
(40:53):
French onion soup. Of course, you know, it generally has
like that big piece of bread in there, which I
think is something that either you love it or that
turns you off a little bit, there being like essentially
a big soggy piece of bread in your soup, which
camper you in. I like it. I do think it's
it's definitely a soup that needs to be I like
to eat it right away. I don't think you should
let it completely disintegrate in your soup, right. Well, I
(41:15):
think it's one of those where it helps to have
one of those uh, you know, crustier, chewier kind of
high protein breads, you know, with like a chewy gluten matrix,
that those work better in that kind of thing than
like a you know, a soft, cakey kind of bread. Right.
And of course it's a it's traditionally a neat based soup,
but there are some excellent mushroom based recipes for it
out there, because yeah, usually they would have a beef
(41:37):
broth piece. Yeah, that's generally true though, that that mushrooms
make an excellent substitute, like a vegetarian substitute for beef flavor,
like anything that calls for beef broth or anything beefy.
You can put mushrooms in there, and I think you'll
have more textural differences than taste differences. Actually, yeah, I'll
bring out like an neunami kind of flavoring, right, mommy, mommy,
(42:00):
you know me. Uh yeah, I mean I remember even
like growing up, like occasionally we would have when we
were you know, eating meat as a family, like the
mushroom gravy would be brought out as a way to
enhance the cut of meat. You know. Yeah, so you
know it makes sense that even even in if the
meat is completely gone, the mushroom or mushroom grave you're
some sort of mushroom based of flavoring will do the job.
(42:22):
A great cooking tip if you ever use dried chitaki
mushrooms in your home, uh and you you know, reconstitute
them in hot water to heat them up. Don't just
use the mushrooms and throw out the broth. That broth
that you reconstituted them in is gold. Now you can
like reduce it, you can freeze it, you can use
it in soups and anything. It tastes amazing. Another survivor
(42:45):
of this, uh this SOPs legacy is apparently was s
ale Um. I don't think I know what that is.
You know, it's in the traditional like holiday punch type
type beverage. Here we go whostling that that's sort of
well like taking the punch out or getting punch or
well yeah, kind of like you know, the holiday sharing
(43:05):
of the punch the wall sale tradition, but apparently like
traditionally it also had toast in it. Here here we
go aboozing is what that means? Yes, okay, and then
toasting each other's health became apparently became more of a
fat in the seventeen hundreds, and the name indeed may
derive from the fact that these beverages that people were
toasting with we're often topped with SOPs. It does make
(43:27):
me wonder if if SOPs will ever make a real comeback,
you know, if say, twenty years from now, like the
new trendy restaurant in New York will be all sop space,
you know, because because the other you know, other toast
items have never really gone out of style. I think
I think there has been kind of a resurgence of
of toast in recent years, and avocado toast, but then
(43:50):
also just uh, you know, some chefs kind of like
focusing in on something uh in some cases toast and saying,
all right, what is it about a good slice of
toast that works? And what how can we deconstruct that?
And and and maybe even put some sort of new
twist on it. Oh yeah, now that you mentioned that
there there's at least one kind of hip restaurant in
town here that we go to sometimes. It does it.
It's got like a whole toasts section of itself. It's
(44:13):
just like toasts with you know, it'll have like a
like a salmon spread topping, or like a like a
mushroom and ricotta topping or something. Yeah. I wonder if
this would be interesting to hear from anyone out there,
who is you know, who's who's active in the culinary
world or the mixology world. I would I would love
to know if anybody is attempting to bring back the
(44:34):
toast garnish. Was that Hendricks drink that I saw online?
Was that just kind of a flash in the pan,
or just like a you know, a lone survivor of
the tradition, or is there anybody out there saying, Hey,
we used to put toast in our drinks and we
should do it again. It's essential. Stop trying to make
toast drinks happen, Robert, It's not going to happen. I
(44:56):
don't I don't know. I I want to try a
good one. I want to I want to try an
authentic one. Well, you know what, I can actually imagine
more so than I guess. It would depend on the
consistency of the drink. Like, if it's like an eggnog
kind of thing, you definitely see using toasting that if
it's like a if it's like a more watery, consistency
type drink, I'm having a harder time imagining actually dipping
the toast in it to any good effect, but I
(45:16):
could imagine it would be a nice pairing of aromas.
I mean, there are some drinks that call for just
like scenting a glass with an aroma. Like sometimes people
will make a drink where they smoke the glass, you know,
like burn aboard and put the glass on it, and
then there's smoke on the glass that gives it this
kind of scent, and then they add the drink to
the glass. I could see a similar thing happening with toast,
because toast is such a pleasant aroma that smell might
(45:39):
pair well with some types of drinks. I don't I
don't know with what liquors, but you know, you can
imagine that. Yeah, well, maybe we can get to the
point where it's like kind of like the bread bowl
that you have for for spinach dips. Sometimes like the
bread chalice, the bread bowl is actually the ultimate stop
that stopped to the stream. Right whoever thought that up
(46:03):
as a genius? Huh, yeah, this is We really only
scratched the surface on like bread traditions and all that
we said. You know, we didn't devote the whole episode.
You just bread. And every culture has its own spin
on particular uses of bread. Uh, you know the things
certainly you stick into bread. Basically there's a hot pocket
of some form and just about every culture. Uh and uh,
(46:25):
you know we don't we don't have time to go
into all of those today. But but bread is an
important part of of human culture, of human history and uh,
you know, even though it's just our everyday sustenance most
of the time, we should stop and appreciate this fabulous invention,
well said Robert. All right. If you would like to
(46:45):
check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to
invention pod dot com. And if you want to support
the show, really the best thing you can do is
a rate and review us wherever you have the power
to do so, and make sure you have subscribed. Huge
thanks to our audio producers for this episode O Seth
Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you would like to
get in touch with us to let us know feedback
(47:05):
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, for just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention
is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
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