What happens when I make toast
For years now — I can’t remember when it started, just that it seems like it’s always been there — I’ve been channeling my grandfathers every time I make toast.
It’s a very specific kind of toast — two pieces, lightly browned — with butter, peanut butter, and jelly from bottom to top, the butter applied with just enough knife pressure to depress the toast into a slightly concave receptacle so that, as the butter melts, it softens the once-crisp toast, readying it for a thick spackling of Skippy that covers all the pores in the bread, leaving a smooth runway for a crash landing of concord grape jelly.
The conjuring requires a specific pattern of assembly: butter 1, butter 2; peanut butter 1, peanut butter 2; jelly 1, jelly 2. (I suppose there may be parts of the world where one first applies butter, peanut butter and jelly on one piece of toast before repeating the process on the other, and, if there are, I would prefer it if they included this on their tourism brochures, because I will surely think twice about visiting them.)
It’s the butter part — from a stick, not a tub* — that summons my grandfathers to the kitchen every time.
* As a Wisconsinite, I hold this truth to be self-evident: it’s not butter if it’s in tub.
Here’s where the pattern matters. When you apply the butter to toast 1, and then return to the stick for your next round of butter for toast 2, you have a nearly 100% chance of leaving behind what 1980s comedian Rich Hall described, in his seminal 1980s work Sniglets: Any Word That Doesn’t Appear in the Dictionary, But Should, as “subatomic toasticles.”
Those toasticles transport me to a Sycamore, Illinois, kitchen in the 1970s. I’m sitting there at Grandma and Grandpa Trapp’s table, my legs swinging from the seat, watching as my grandfather, the town doc who delivered me into the world (another story for another time), ate his morning toast, my eyes drawn to the stick of butter, lightly breaded around the rim of the cutting end with crumbs, as it sat there warming on purpose-built cream-colored china, detailed with faded maroon vegetation creeping out to the edges.
The transmogrified toast, healing after its trial by toaster fire through the magic of butter into something softer, a more pliant and transcendent version of itself, is what conjures Grandpa Anselment, whose enormous rough hands would cradle each piece of toast while he applied the butter, placing down one piece and then the other on top, hastening the melting. It’s the softness of the toast, that squishy-spongy goodness, that takes me to Grandma and Grandpa Anselment’s 1980s Port St. Lucie, Florida, kitchen. I was perfectly capable of making the toast myself, but teenaged me loved Grandpa’s toast, slathered with butter and topped with peanut butter and jelly.
Some families have intergenerational recipes — chocolate-chip cookies, pozole, vegetable soups, moonshine, noodles — that connect descendants with their ancestors, even long after those ancestors have moved on to whatever’s next.
Me? I have toast.
A very specific toast.
And it’s perfect.