The History of Toast

Toast was created entirely by accident during the 1500s by a witch. Her name was Ethel Bagshaw.

She'd been experimenting with different ways to provide heat shielding about her person in case of a witch trial. Sliced bread seemed an obvious choice.

You may not know this, but a frozen pizza base provides more direct heat protection than one of the ceramic tiles used on the Space Shuttle. It costs significantly less, weighs less, and tastes better.

The frozen pizza base, however, hadn't been invented back then. Perhaps Ethel, with her supernatural abilities, had tapped into some sense of what was to come and so tried out the bread.

The testing wasn't as successful as hoped. The bread, of course, toasted beautifully. (Toasted — a word from the Latin torrere, meaning "to make brown and delicious".)

Suffering some minor burns, Ethel set about applying butter to the wounds, as was the way then. In her haste, much of the butter accidentally smothered the toasted bread.

The combination of butter on toast was immediately irresistible, and so the first buttered toast was born.

In delight at her discovery, Ethel tried to share it with her townsfolk. They were so dumbstruck by its brilliance that it was immediately deemed the result of witchcraft and, consequently, Ethel was drowned on a dunking stool.

The bread probably didn't help with the floating either.

Ethel's demise wasn't the demise of toast, though. Like many sinful vices, it was immediately adopted by the clergy.

Toast became part of the daily life of those in the Church, its magnificence initially kept secret. But it was so popular that it wasn't long before the aristocracy got wind of it too.

Not long after this, toast became a ritual part of public-school boarders' lives. Eventually, during the Industrial Revolution, when schools for the masses were deemed a good idea, the secret of toast was revealed to everyone.

And Britain became great, fuelled by sweet tea and the warm, buttery stuff.

So now, for over a hundred years, toast has been enjoyed by everyone.