I just tried cooking toast under the grill. I have an electric oven, complete with a 1970s-style see-through window, four fully functional hobs and a classic flap-down-slide-out grill with retractable grill-pan.
Let's get the obvious questions out of the way first. I don't have a toaster. When I moved in (a year ago) I decided I didn't want to eat toast, or in fact bread at all! Bread, like a claggy mess, has a habit of getting stuck inside me as I digest it, making me feel fatter than a riverside duck on a Sunday afternoon.
It's become something of a treat then, the old crusty loaf. I go to Sainsbury's sometimes and find a nice lump of tiger bread, that one with rosemary on it, or a good old focaccia. If you're going to jam your insides with sticky carbohydrate, I say to myself, you may as well enjoy it as it gloops its way down.
As it happens, I don't have room for a toaster. I don't have room for anything in my kitchen actually, not even me, most of the time. Washing up is like plate-spinning with soapy fingers; unpacking the shopping turns into a sort of artful one-man Jenga, while the eggs wobble on top of the box of tea bags and the fridge swings open.
I decided on Marmite on toast tonight. I clutched the loaf in one hand, and rather as I imagine a surgeon would, I brandished the glistening bread knife in the other. Then firmly I began sawing. Back and forth, back and forth. I wiped the sweat from my brow with my arm and carried on, tiny crumbs of sawdust flying in all directions. Why do they make it so difficult to cut? It was as though the bread itself was resisting me. Eventually I decided to pick it up and, examining the last bit of precision slicing required, I started hacking through it in mid-air.
That wasn't sensible.
Moments later (after a trip to the cold tap) I returned, the forefinger of my left hand throbbing inside its makeshift turban of tissue-paper, held together with an elastic band. Not for the first time, I made a mental note to get myself a proper first-aid-kit.
I'm undeterred though by misadventure. I'm an explorer, a pioneer of my generation! Would Captain Scott have turned the ship around when it first got a bit nippy? Did Columbus get cold feet halfway across the Atlantic? No sir! Injury? Adversity? Ha! I laugh in the face of such things!
And so, having machetéd my way through the loaf, I was not going to give in and let the bread defeat me. I switched on the grill and carefully sawed myself a second slice of delicious white (and slightly red) bread.
"I'm eating Marmite on toast," I messaged my friends. I felt certain they'd want to know what I was up to.
Toast is remarkable in my opinion. It's very different to bread and it's amazing how that simple act of heating it up seems to change its molecular structure. It's one of nature's most wonderful transformations; that, and milk becoming cheese, water fermenting through a grape and a short phone call turning into a self-delivering pizza. Just a little heat, a little fire, enough to gently burn the top and crystallise the middle into a soft, crunchy, crumbly breadcake, and you have a thing so powerfully, deliciously and irreversibly cooked that it can melt butter in an instant, and be dribbling with lovely Marmite before you know it.
And so simple to make too! Just switch on and slide it in! What could be easier?
I pulled out the tray after a few minutes, using the detachable handle. Two pieces of cold, lifeless bread sat on the grill pan, as white as clean sheets.
It turned out that I had switched on the oven by mistake.
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