A Brief History of Toast by Fiona Pipette

Thanks to Good Housekeeping 

Title: A Brief History of Toast

Author: Fiona Pipette

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #7)

In One of our Thursdays is Missing, the Toast Marketing Board, a wholly owned subsidiary of Goliath Foodstuffs, Inc., tries to bribe the written Thursday Next (the Thursday who features in the fictional books inside the Thursday Next books that you can buy from all good bookstores) to mention them (the Toast Marketing Board, keep up) in an aggressive product placement scheme. The written Thursday does add references to the Board to the text of her books (much to the displeasure of some other characters), but why they wanted publicity in her books when hardly anyone reads them is anyone’s guess.

Later in the real (our) Thursday’s timeline, there is a chain of Yo Toast! outlets selling toast-based meals. In Chapter 5, Thursday orders thick cut white toast with butter and orange marmalade. Apparently TV chefs are falling over themselves to write entire books dripping with pretentious toast recipes.

Commander Braxton Hicks chooses couple of slices of white with peanut butter, and then orders a sardine and moon-dried banana on caraway seed with reduced butter and coleslaw and shredded trumpet (only for decoration) on the side.

Of course toast is wonderful. There’s something about a crunch of toasted bread with your cheese or baked beans or cherry jam or leftover stew. I’m not so mad about avocado toast though. I know it has taken the world by storm but I don’t really like my food squashed. My mother once made the awful mistake of squashing bananas instead of slicing them when she made me a sandwich. We never quite recovered from the trauma. But does toast really need a marketing board? 

I wonder how much Fiona Pipette has found to write about toast? Perhaps there’s a lot of stuff about the history of toasters. Er… no on the other hand it’s probably a TikTok spinoff book. Er… no again: Thursday’s world doesn’t have TikTok. Damn!

Also mentioned in The Woman Who Died a Lot are A Short History of SpecOps*and A Longer History of SpecOps plus of course the essential The Thursday Next Chronicles by the ever popular writer Millon de Floss. Can enough ever be written about the amazing Thursday Next we ask ourselves?

*SpecOps - Special Operations Network.

Thanks to Cookie and Kate