Given how much we eat, it’s amazing that no book has ever been devoted to toast. Here Heidi Nathan provides a true first with contributions from Dame Maureen Lipman and Joanna Lumley. An essential guide to tastier toast toppings featuring delicious recipes sprinkled with anecdotes and facts on the history of toast ‘Bread and water can so easily be tea and toast.’ was famously written on a tea towel and in the pages of Punch magazine in 1852 where a man cried ’No bread? Then bring me toast!’ For Heidi Nathan ‘it has become my guilt trip to just stick whatever is left in the fridge on a slice of hot buttered toast. At the expense of my BMI, this, shamefully, has become primarily how I eat.’ But for her toast is much more than a grilled slice of bread. In this book she gives the ultimate guide to what you can put on toast. Joanna Lumley explains her own favourite toppings which include Home-made marmalade, quite sour, quite chunky. Marmite: and sometimes peanut butter on top of the marmite, with watercress squashed onto the top of that. Baked beans pronounced baked beings for no reason other than to get an easy laugh. She is a great comedienne after all. Toast also involves technology. The “modern” timed pop-up toaster was created in 1919. Toasters got increasingly thinner and blended into the late 20th century kitchen neatly, until the tide turned as tides tend to do and bulky alloy mock art deco ones emerged.