The History of Toast

1. The History of Toast

2. The history of toast begins, of course, with
bread. The earliest archaeological evidence of
flour dates back some 30,000 years, and it’s likely
people were making flatbreads around that time,
too.
Along with being a staple food in many
civilizations, ritual bread was sometimes used as
an offering to the gods in Ancient Greece.
Wheat and barley were a few of the first crops
domesticated in the Fertile Crescent—despite
not being as nutritionally rich as other food
sources that could be gathered, the bread that
resulted from grain crops was able to sustain a
larger population. It’s thought that the ability to
make bread was a factor in ancient peoples
being able to end their nomadic lifestyle and
settle in one place.

3. Bread as we know it today was likely invented in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians
learned that if they left dough sitting out for a while, it would rise. When baked,
the bread would retain its risen shape. This was, of course, due to yeast spores
in the air finding their way to the dough.
The closed oven was invented in Egypt for the baking of leavened breads by
3000 B.C., and the workers who built the famous pyramids were often paid
partially with bread.
At this point in history, leavened bread was a lighter bread that was considered
much nicer than flat breads. There was just one problem: left out in the desert
heat for long periods of time, it would go hard and became difficult to eat.
The solution? Toast. It’s likely that toast originated as a way to preserve bread
rather than as a tasty breakfast item smothered in butter and jam. By scorching
slices of bread, they lasted longer (This is also why “French” Toast first began
being made – it’s all about not wasting food.)

4. The practice of toasting bread became popular in the
Roman Empire. The word “toast” actually comes
from the Latin “tostum,” which means “to burn or
scorch.” The first breads were likely toasted by laying
them in front of the fire on a hot stone. Later,
simple devices were created to toast bread in the fire,
such as wire frames to cook the toast more evenly, or
even sticks like those we use to toast marshmallows
over a campfire today.
The first electric toaster was invented in 1893 by
Scotsman Alan MacMasters, but it wasn’t very
popular. The iron wiring would often melt, creating a
fire hazard. That was if people could use the toaster
at all, as electricity wasn’t widespread at this time.

5. In 1905, two Chicago inventors created an alloy that was highly fire resistant. That meant
others could take another shot at a safer, more effective electric toaster. Several different
electric toasters were invented around the same time. These toasters could only toast one
side of the bread at once, and then the bread had to be flipped. Future developments
included the automatic toast-turner (created in 1913) and the semi-automatic toaster, which
turned off the heating element when the bread was cooked. The “modern” timed pop-up
toaster was created in 1919.
By this time, an invention was in the works that would make grabbing some toast in the
morning even easier: pre-sliced bread. The world’s first automatic bread slicer was invented
by Otto Frederick Rohwedder in Davenport, Iowa. He built a prototype of his bread slicer
in 1912. Unfortunately, his blueprints and machine were destroyed in a fire in 1917.
From there, he struggled to obtain funding to begin again on his machine as the idea of pre-
sliced bread was not at all popular among bakers. Yes, even the invention of pre-sliced
bread- which shortly would give us the phrase “The greatest thing since sliced bread”- was a
hard sell at first because bakers worried that the bread would go stale before it could be
sold. They also felt the reduction in shelf life of the bread would not be popular among
consumers, even if it was reasonably well packaged to try to delay the inevitable accelerated
staleness as much as possible.

6. Finally, in 1927, Rohwedder was
able to re-build his machine and
produce a model ready to use in an
actual bakery. In order to get
around the “staleness” problem,
Rohwedder initially tried to hold
the pieces of bread together after
slicing with pins. The pins would
then be removed when you wanted
a slice.
This didn’t really work out for a variety of reasons and he ultimately simply modified his
machine to wrap the sliced loaves in wax paper directly after slicing.
Pre-sliced bread helped to further popularize toast and the toaster, because it was easy to grab
a few uniformly cut slices, pop them in the toaster, and have breakfast a few minutes
later. And the rest, as they say, is history.

7. THE END