#12: Toast Sandwiches

Stuff That's Lame About England is a column about a grey, rainy island (or possibly archipelago) in the North Atlantic. The column is comprised of articles with no factual basis, composed without the benefit of any research whatsoever, and with any luck will contain several half-truths, misconceptions, and flat-out lies per article. It neither knows nor cares what the difference is between the British, the English, and the residents of the United Kingdom. It is a travelogue written out of pure guesswork with a dash of irrational xenophobia.

For the record, the closest any of us editors have been to experiencing that Sceptered Isle is Graeme's three hour layover in Heathrow on his way to Africa or whatever. But we've all listened to Oasis so we're basically experts.

Sometimes in America, where our major news outlets are staffed variously by monsters and goblins, we hold up the socialist public news organizations of other, more successful countries as evidence of their superiority and our descent into competition for 80th Best Country slot (we're coming for you, Tajikistan!). And sometimes the BBC and CBC are great! But sometimes they are not. Sometimes they reflect their country's sadness and greatest faults right back at them. And we all know that one of England's greatest (of many) faults is...food. And so the BBC, world-class news outlet, presents this story on toast sandwiches.

Are you perhaps thinking that a "toast sandwich" is something like a panini? Or a toasted hoagie? Stop thinking that. England is not advanced enough as a civilization to understand that sandwiches are supposed to include other ingredients besides bread. This is despite possibly having invented the sandwich? Is that true? In honor of the journalistic achievements of the BBC I will choose not to look that up, not even on Yahoo Answers where the answer will be misspelled and incorrect and probably racist somehow.

The toast sandwich is, and here I quote that venerable malignant tumor that is the BBC, "two slices of bread around a slice of toast." The Biebers then continues the story by explaining the many benefits of such a non-sandwich sandwich: it is cheap (well, yes), it is healthy (this is why the English will be extinct as a race in fourteen years, the island taken over by squirrels or pheasants or some shit as the residents of Dull Grass Island become ever more pale and sickly and anemic and wither away into nothingness), it is "surprisingly nice to eat" (bet it's not) and "quite filling" (not compared to sandwiches that are actually sandwiches). The other ingredients are butter and salt and pepper, because I suppose the British have seen enough Top Chef to know that you season everything, even if your meal is a Dickensian short-stack of bread and nothing else.

The article also calls for the toast to be cooled before being smothered between its brethren. This is an important step. The idea of HOT materials touching COOL or ROOM-TEMPERATURE materials? This is shocking to the residents of the Lesser North Atlantic Ocean Rocks, who all have the palate of a ten-year-old white suburban boy with no mouth.

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There is a recipe for a toast sandwich in this article.

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What's weird here is the utterly earnest way this news is presented, although I do detect a hint of embarrassment in the fact that no specific writer is bylined. That will not halt the blame, BBC! I now blame ALL OF YOU.

I read the first few comments to see if other Druids would be like "um you are out of your goddamn mind, BBC? This is not a real thing and people that write hateful ignorant articles about our admittedly awful country should be aware that people don't actually eat this because there is no way English food is this cartoonishly awful in real life." The first comment does in fact note that this is a "boring, tasteless sandwich," but then notes that he'll "stick to his favourite, cheese on toast."

Pictured above: the best of English fine dining.

THAT IS ALSO NOT A SANDWICH. That is the first two steps of several other steps necessary to create a meal fit for god damn adults. This I looked up, because unlike the history of the word "sandwich," I made a wager with myself that any further research of the phrase "cheese on toast" would result in just total humiliation for the Grand High Wizard Queen's Islands of Sadness. And I won that wager! Facts learned during 25 seconds of research in which I did not even finish the three-paragraph Wikipedia article of the subject:

1. Under the "recipes" section: "Cheese on toast consists of toast, either buttered or not, with cheese on one side." Do not be fooled into thinking there is more to this dish than the words in its name! There is not, for the English are a race blessed with neither imagination nor tastebuds!

2. There is a "National Cheese on Toast Day." I believe this is also the day where any Englishperson fortunate enough to have left the Archipelago of Cold Precipitation kills themselves, thus performing a crude but effective form of population control.

3. This dish/object is included in English cookbooks. This bolsters my theory that the British are actually functionally illiterate, since the phrase "cheese on toast" is itself a recipe.

It is possible that the BBC's investigation of the toast sandwich is actually an extension of the population control experiment indicated in Reason Number Two, above. How else to explain this passage?

"I would emphasise that toast sandwiches are also good at saving you calories as well as money, provided you only have one toast sandwich for lunch and nothing else."

This is how England dies, people. This is how it all mercifully ends.