toasty and toastie

Back in the comments for the milk and tea post, a debate has arisen about toast racks. Since mine is the only opinion that reflects the One Real Truth, I repeat my contribution here, so that everyone may benefit (again):

Toast racks are evil. The entire point of toast is that it should be warm. That way, the butter melts into it and it's yummy. The toast rack is the most efficient way to make toast cold fast.

The American way is to serve toast piled up, sometimes wrapped in a cloth napkin in a basket, so that the heat is retained. Many British people find this horrible. They say "but the toast gets soggy!" I do not understand this fear of soggy toast--and I believe that the sogginess of piled-up toast is much exaggerated. (I like it soggy with butter, after all.)

But cold toast, that is something to be feared!

Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast. I have a toast-based lifestyle. I have at least one friendship that is built on toast. And now I've thought of a linguistic angle on the toast rack issue, giving me a legitimate excuse to cast blame on toast racks again and more.

The linguistic angle is the adjective toasty, meaning 'warm and co{s/z}y'. Although the OED does not mark this as AmE, I've had to explain it to English folk a number of times and all of the OED's examples for this sense are American, so I think we can safely say that it is 'chiefly AmE'. (The OED offers another sense, 'having a slightly burnt flavour', which is particularly used by tea [chiefly AmE] buffs regardless of dialect.) So, why does BrE lack this evocative adjective of comfiness? It must be the toast racks! Since toast-racked toast is cold and cardboard-like with a coating of waxy butter keeping the jam at a safe distance from the bread, one would never associate it with the lovely feelings one has when, say, wrapped in a (AmE) comforter (duvet) by an open fire with a mug full of cocoa (= hot chocolate) while snow gently falls outside. Or when one puts one's feet into slippers that have been left near a radiator. Ooooh, lovely.

I've had to explain toasty to BrE speakers on a number of occasions because of its comparative form toastier, which is a relatively frequent eight-letter (AmE) bingo/(BrE) bonus word in the world of competitive Scrabble. In fact, it's probably more often played not as a bingo/bonus, but as part of a cross-play in which one adds the R at the end of an already-played seven-letter bingo/bonus, toastie. This one is a word that Americans might have to ask about (although they might mistakenly assume that it's an alternative spelling of toasty). A (BrE) toastie is a toasted sandwich; so, you might (or I might) go to the (BrE) tea bar or café and order a cheese toastie. In AmE this would be a toasted cheese (sandwich) or a grilled cheese (sandwich). For me, the AmE terms differ in that a toasted cheese is made under the (AmE) broiler/(BrE) grill, but a grilled cheese is made in a frying pan (which may be called a skillet in AmE)--although I've met AmE speakers who don't make that distinction. If it were made in one of those sandwich-press things, I think I'd call it a grilled cheese, but I can't be sure about my intuition on that--one doesn't see those machines as often in the US. In the UK (Land of Sandwiches), every tea bar has them, and they make toasties. Making such sandwiches in frying pans is not so common--I've introduced my in-laws to the wonders of the grilled (i.e. fried) sandwich through what I like to call the Three C Sandwich: cheddar, chicken and cranberry sauce. (Make it with half-fat cheddar (Waitrose's is best) and diet bread, and it can be done for under 200 calories. Be sure to put the cranberry sauce between the cheese and chicken, so that it doesn't soak the bread.)

And while this probably should be a separate post, another thing to note about toasties/toasted sandwiches is the order in which their fillings are listed. In the US, I'd have a toasted cheese or a toasted bacon and cheese, whereas in the UK, I'd be more likely to have a cheese and bacon. In both countries, it would be cheese and tomato (though, of course, the pronunciation of tomato would differ). These are what is known in the linguistics trade as "irreversible binomials": two words on either side of a conjunction (and in these cases) that idiomatically occur in a particular order. So, one says bread and butter rather than butter and bread and gin and tonic rather than tonic and gin. A generali{s/z}ation that one can usually make about such food binomials is that the first item is the one that's more "substantive"--the "meat", as it were, in the formula (hence meat and potatoes/meat and two veg, not potatoes and meat or two veg and meat). So, the gin is the stronger item in gin and tonic and it goes first, and bread is the heart of the bread-and-butter combination. BrE and AmE agree that in cheese/tomato combinations, the cheese outweighs the tomato in importance, but often disagree in the combination of cheese and meat. Better Half (although vegetarian) says that he'd say cheese and bacon but ham and cheese, but the latter may be AmE-influenced. Cheese and ham is heard in the UK (and it was all I heard in South Africa), but in the US ham and cheese is irreversible. Because it's not quite as irreversible in the UK, I'd say that there's some unsureness about which item is the 'important' bit in a ham/cheese or bacon/cheese sandwich (the cheese because it's basic to the toasted sandwich experience, or the ham because it's meat?), whereas in the US meat reliably trumps cheese.

The photo of the toast rack, in case you're the type of perverted soul who wants a toast rack, is from the website of an American company, The British Shoppe (I take no responsibility for the [chiefly BrE] twee spelling), where it's listed as 'Toast Rack (English style)'.