Raines - On toast: tartine, crostini, and open-faced sandwiches

Tartines, Crostini, and Open-Faced Sandwiches

Kristan Raines

2016 by Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

Text 2016 Quarto Publishing Group USA

Photography 2016 Kristan Raines

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Quarry Books, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

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Digital edition published in 2016

Digital edition: 978-1-62788-839-4

Hardcover edition: 978-1-63159-077-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in

Publication Data

Raines, Kristan, author.

Toast : tartine, crostini, and open-faced sandwiches / Kristan Raines.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-63159-077-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-62788-839-4 (digital edition)

1. Toast (Bread) I. Title.

TX769.R285 2015

641.815--dc23

2015025886

Design: Timothy Samara

Cover Image: Kristan Raines

To my beloved husband John.

Thank you for your love, encouragement, and endless support.

Everything that is wrong with our culture begins with the book you hold in your hands.

The epic fetishism and highly focused gourmet-ification of everything under the sun, of which we are all now a partice cream, chocolate, coffee, toast, organic, cage-free donut holeshas some frightening aspects and important historical antecedents you should be aware of. Theodor Adorno called it the culture industry.

The culture industry includes up-selling common items and doubling their price through desire and hypnosis. In terms of marketing tastes, people today have more access to higher-quality foods than royalty did 200 years ago. This unprecedented demand for the consumption of specialty items as a lifestyle by more and more people means that the planet is dying.

How does this relate to toast?

Toast is a simple food, accessible to all. It is the stuff of peasants and farmers and the earth. It is comfort and nourishment, plain and simple. Somehow, strangely though, it too has become momentarily elevated to the gourmet platform, another shiny object in the pantheon of shiny objects.

Toast is here for a reason, though. It has an ulterior motive.

While this simple food has your attention, here is what toast is really trying to say to you. Here is what it wants you to know:

About 50 percent of people who have a near-death experience get divorced.

Thats right. Not what you were expecting to hear? I know, but thats what toast has to say.

Additionally, it wants us to know that helping others is a good use of our time.

I was asked to write this foreword because people have decided that I am one of the people who have heralded the elevation of toast to its new status.

In 2007 I opened a caf called Trouble Coffee with $1000 and the help of everyone I knew. A community of people gathered to put up drywall, fix old machinery, and build cabinets in a tiny space that became Trouble Coffee. Our motto is Build Your Own Damn House. We serve coffee, whole coconuts, and toast. Toast was something I grew up with. Its a comfort food.

Less comfortable was an experience when I nearly drowned last year. I have been an ocean swimmer for about eleven years, a practice that helps me shock the illusions out of my system. On this particular day I lost consciousness under the water, pinned against the rocks by a series of rogue waves that were literally pounding me into oblivion. It was only because someone helped me, risking their own life to save mine, that I found myself on the beach, lungs full of water, as I let the ocean out and began to breathe again.

The world is full of people who need our help. This is a good use of our time.

People who come back from near-death experiences commonly report on their change of perspective and also the utter silliness of our various pursuits, spending sprees, and tastes that do nothing to help anyone.

After undergoing a near-death experience, it is common for their partners, the people who married them and thought they knew them, to report that their husbands and wivescareer-driven, money-making, iron-clad stalwartssuddenly become almost unknown to them and just want to help people.

Drowning was the best thing that ever happened to me. I highly recommend it. It is my wish, and that of toast itself, that you too have an experience by which you become who you really are, and unknown to those around you.

Wishing you the best,

Giulietta Carelli Founder, Trouble Coffee

P.S. A special thanks goes to Kristan for sharing her love of simple foods, including toast. A need to make toast for others, in all its varieties, started with our own experience as children. To this day there is a magic wonder that goes with a proper toast.

If you think about it for a moment, many of our most beloved meals are simply a slice of toast or a biscuit put to its greatest use, such as Eggs Benedict or, of course, French toast.

Each Saturday morning my father would wake me up at sunrise and whisk me away to our favorite breakfast spot. We were beyond regularsI swear our orders were being prepared the moment we walked through the door. My father would have eggs sunny side up with a side of bacon, and I never wanted to grow out of a Belgian waffle with whipped cream. But the most enjoyable part of the morning meal was always my trusty side of sourdough toast, smothered in melted butter and topped with good old-fashioned strawberry jam. It might be hard to believe, but those four little slices of toast brought me so much joy, no matter how full I was.

I know what youre thinking: Can toast really be that important? Is it not just a complement to a meal, even an afterthought? Well, I think it can be more, and over the years, I have grown to appreciate how versatile a slice of toast can truly be. Actually, if you think about it for a moment, many of our most beloved meals are simply a slice of toast or a biscuit put to its greatest use, such as eggs Benedict or, of course, French toast. So while fine artisan toast is more likely to be found on cozy breakfast tables and pioneering menus today, it has actually been around for quite some time. Ambitious toast recipes have been gaining popularity, but the idea of dressing a piece of grilled toast for a meal is one of history.