Why Artisan Toast Is Not Artisanal
There’s a piece of scorched cinnamon toast on the kitchen counter. I was making it for my daughter’s breakfast this morning, and I left it under the broiler for about 20 seconds too long, so we defaulted to cereal because today is a school day and we needed to get going. This, sadly, is the fate of about half of the cinnamon toast I make for her, and even though I have the experience and knowledge base to excel at making toast, poor cinnamon toast all too often falls victim to the blackening of the weekday morning rush of packing a lunch box and brewing coffee and letting the dog outside to pee. Good cinnamon toast can’t be simply toasted in a toaster and then buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. It must be broiled. This melds the butter and melting sugar to create a sweet lacquer, and it wakes up the flavor of the cinnamon, and it gets the very outer edges of the crust a bit more brown than our regular slot toaster can manage.
Yet our broiler is persnickety, and if I were a true toast artisan, I would not leave the spot as I subjected the slice of toast to the blazing orange glow of the broiler. I would closely monitor its progress and pull it at exactly the right moment of peak browning, with just a hint of char in just the right spots. I am not a toast artisan. In fact, there’s no such thing as a toast artisan.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about this subject more than I’d like to. This week, four article pitches on artisan toast landed in my inbox, and I cannot help but read them with a resigned sigh. It’s not so much the toast; toasted bread is delicious, and it’s even more so when topped with something else delicious. It’s the terminology. The supposed current mania for artisan toast strikes me as being rooted in something more than good eating. It’s about our hunger for charmingly absurd trends and our desire to fetishize food, as if it were a series of trading cards to verify our devotion to all things delightful and edible. “I’ll swap you two vegan doughnut food trucks for an assortment of artisan toast!” “Throw in some of that heirloom baby romanesco from the farmers’ market and it’s a deal.”
It’s also about the meaning of words evolving, a process that’s natural and silly to resist, yet resist I do. In my favorite dictionary (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, fifth edition, published in 1947) the entry for artisan reads “one trained in some mechanic art or trade; a handicraftsman.” I have high doubts that, for every gastropub and wine bar with fancy toast on the menu, there’s a skilled, specially trained toast artisan in the kitchen. Peek through those doors and you’ll find chefs and cooks, and they already have titles: chefs and cooks. Assuming they are not hacks, their talents easily include the toasting of bread.
But we’ve pulled and stretched the word artisan to indicate not the skills of the person making it, but the handcrafted nature of the item itself. Your English teacher would say the correct modifier would be “artisanal” if it’s describing toast, or salt blend, or a gussied-up fast food burger, or a box of crackers, or a bottle of salad dressing. Companies are now trotting all of these items out and proclaiming them to be artisan, effectively neutering the word.