Bread/Toast/Toasters

Published Aug 5, 2019, 4:00 AM

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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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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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From agriculture to the X-ray machine, Stuff to Blow Your Mind hosts Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick e 
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