Before I left, though, my grandparents had bequeathed to me their old cast-iron skillet: chipped orange enamel on the outside, and thirty years of blackened grease coating the inside. It was heavy; it was perfect. You can’t buy skillets like this; they have to be earned over decades of use, so that all of the oils and fats of meals past soak into the iron and add their bouquet to meals present.
I didn’t have a toaster, and until my first paycheck, I didn’t have a whole lot of money either. So in the start-up trips to Ikea—make that Target—make that Walmart, I had to pick and choose. A toaster missed out of the first cut. Butter was cheaper, though, and I soon discovered a secret: melt a little (or more than a little) butter on the skillet, put a slice of bread face down on it, then flip and repeat, and you’d get toast. In fact, you’d get great toast, a crispysavory crust of fried butter locking in a chewybready core, at the ready for jams or fried eggs and cheese or even just plain. The technique worked so well that I began buying higher quality bakery bread to go with it. It just seemed fitting.
Pass a few weeks, establish ruts of the daily routine, and I noticed something I’d missed before: it takes a long time to make toast on my skillet. For one thing, my skillet is really only large enough to toast one regular-sized piece of bread at a time. And another thing is that you have to watch the toast all the time, to flip it at the right moment, just before golden brown would turn to smoke and charred black. You can’t just press and button and trust springs and levers to do the work for you. I began to have toast less frequently.
Then one day in Target, I noticed some very inexpensive appliances. I’d gotten a little money by then, a couple of paychecks, so that a $7 toaster didn’t seem like all that big a deal. At least it wasn’t on the margin anymore for making my month’s rent. I brought home the cheapest one, a little aluminum box painted white.
Now I have toast more frequently again. It’s nowhere near as good delicious, but it works as a vehicle for peanut butter and jam. Now, I pop down my bread—pre-sliced—while I’m frying my eggs and the two come up done at just the same time. And that is just how things are now.
