White Sliced Bread

By Simon Carlo

As a child the first time I was allowed alone off the road on which we lived, it was to fetch bread. Google now tells me the distance was 160m, though to my little sparrow legs it seemed a lengthy adventure, with one fairly quiet road to cross before I navigated the gentle bend on the way to Ray’s corner shop. Guarding the pound coin in my clasped fist, with my other hand firmly clamped around that hand for double protection, I entered the shop. I headed straight to the centre aisle, looking for the amber hues of the Warburtons Toastie paper packaging. I paid, carefully counted the change which was mine and made the quick call to get either a Wham bar or bag of Warheads, knowing I had to be quick or else my parents would come looking for me if I wasn’t back. I left to find Dad waiting on the corner. He had followed me there all along.

That bread shaped my childhood. It was toasted and heavily buttered as a vehicle for either baked beans or spaghetti hoops, and formed the backbone for the crisp sandwiches I begged for as a treat. Even now, as an adult of sorts, my favourite food memory involves white sliced bread: curry sauce and chips in a tray from the local Cantonese takeaway with three slices of the stuff so heavily buttered that the liquid elements would merge into a nuclear yellow gloop and run down your arm as you ate it. I’ve said for years it would be my ‘Off Menu’ main course until someone pointed out it could technically qualify as my side dish. So now it’s main course and side dish.

But it has to be the toastie cut. Any less and it will tear, any more (I’m looking at you Super Toastie) and you’ll never make it to the inside of the fold. It’s the bread that never goes off. The kind that will stick around as fodder for the termites in the event of a nuclear war. Nobody really knows what it is made of and equally nobody really wants to know. In the age of sourdoughs and focaccias and gourmet ciabattas hand massaged by moustachioed men on the hour, it still has a place. Only the absurd would stick

a focaccia in a Breville, and anyone who has made a sandwich with sourdough can testify that it needs to be eaten quickly or else the bread becomes mushier than a Richard Curtis movie. White sliced bread is the solid foundation we all need. It should run for Prime Minister.

We have a ritual on Christmas Day which is really quite simple. Dad makes the bacon and egg sarnies, eats with us and then returns to the kitchen to cook whilst the rest of us get drunk and play cards. The make-up of that sandwich never changes: high quality back bacon, Burford Brown eggs, ketchup, lots of that gold and black packaged butter from Waitrose, and Warburtons white bread cut to toastie. It’s the greatest thing in the world (the childhood Cantonese restaurant has long since closed), yet I tried my best to sabotage it one year by insisting I took some rather lovely sourdough from an excellent local bakery. It was carnage. Butter and yolk and ketchup seeping through the uneven crumb air pockets, onto wrists and Christmas jumpers and new jeans that now need washing after just three hours of life. The bread collapsing into itself like a malfunction in the Hadron Collider. Children crying and adults cursing, I’d ruined the big day way worse than a 10pm showing of Mrs Brown’s Boys. I’m surprised they have forgiven me. You simply don’t get these problems with white sliced bread.