IN Britain we like to use our loaf every day. Indeed we are the world champions of toast, chomping our way through 700 million slices a week. Gimmick or not, spread the word that next Friday is National Toast Day when the nation is invited to raise a toast to toast.

As Alan Davidson's exhaustive culinary bible, The Oxford Companion To Food*, defines it: "Toast, as everyone in Britain knows, is made by placing a slice of bread in front of dry heat - a fire, a grill, or an electric toaster - until the surface browns and gives off an attractive smell.

"The attractive taste, smell and colour of toast come from the thermal decomposition of sugar and starch molecules on the surface of the bread."

According to Davidson, the true toast addict is particular about its preparation, choosing day-old baker's bread to make it, and insisting it is eaten as soon as ready.

"Good toast must be consumed whilst hot," he says. "It is the smell of toast, and the sensations of the hot crunchy outside of the bread combined with the soft inner crumb and melted butter, that make it so appealing. Left to go cold, it becomes leathery and loses its aroma."

Speculating on why toast should have become such an English speciality, he suggests that English wheat bread's capability to keep for several days was a contributory factor. "It certainly lends itself more to toasting than the close-textured rye breads, staple food in much of northern Europe."

Toast, or tost as it was first called, first acquired popularity in the Middle Ages, when fire-toasted pieces of bread were used to soak up liquids. Meat toppings became fashionable in the 16th century; and cinnamon toast, with its paste of sugar and cinnamon moistened in wine, was in vogue in the 17th century, when the century ended with hot buttered toast as a breakfast table favourite.

In the 1890s, the Parisian chef Auguste Escoffier of the Ritz Hotel created a thinly sliced piece of toast. Its name, Melba Toast, is supposedly inspired by the fussy eating requirements of the Australian diva, Nellie Melba, who had declined to eat her pat on the customary thick slice of bread.

Be that tale true or merely apocryphal, Melba toast is but one more reason to make National Toast Day every day.

*Alan Davison's The Oxford Companion To Food is published by Oxford University Press.

TOP OF THE POP-UPS

From the state-of-the-toast toaster makers, Dualit, here is a toast-eating survey of the UK:

u Our weekly total of toast is more than 700 million slices, enough slices to go round the world twice.

u We Brits eat an average of more than 104 million slices per day.

u Nine out of ten people eat between four to 25 slices per week.

u Most toast, nearly 40 per cent, is eaten at breakfast time.

u One in ten people prefer burnt toast; 11 per cent insist on cutting it into triangles; five per cent like their favourite spread on both sides.

TOAST STORIES

u The Millennium Dome, at Greenwich, included an electric toaster among the most important inventions of the millennium. The first electric toaster appeared in 1909; the first automatic electric toaster was designed by Charles Strite in 1919.

u The shop L S Ayres stocks yellow flannel pyjamas with flying toasters as a motif.

u Demeter Fragrances make toast-smelling perfumes, not least Cinnamon Toast Cologne Spray.

u The Teletubbies' CD-ROM includes a game called Time For Toast, in which the participants try to make tubby toast without being cleaned up by Noo-Noo.

u The aptly named toast fanatic Bob Blumer, alias the Surreal Gourmet, completed a three-month, 30-city, trans-continental culinary adventure in his Toastermobile, an air-stream trailer customised with a $50,000 stainless-steel kitchen, topped off with two eight-foot slices of toast.

Toast films: the sci-fi trilogy of The Brave Little Toaster, The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars and The Brave Little Toaster To The Rescue.

Toast in film: In The Blues Brothers, Elwood Blues orders dry white toast as his entire meal.

Toast in film two: Nick Park's second Wallace & Gromit adventure, The Wrong Trousers, features a high-tech system for spreading jam on toast.

Vinyl on toast: Streetband, featuring the vocals of then-unknown Luton soul singer Paul Young, had a number 18 hit in November 1978 with their hymn in praise of toast, Toast.

Books on toast: Why Toast Lands Jelly Side Down: Zen and the Art of Physics Demonstrations; Rediscover Toast; Toasters 1909-1960: A Look at the Ingenuity and Design of Toaster Makers; Chameleon The Spy and The Terrible Toaster Trap; Angels On Toast.

From the Dr Toast website collection of toast haikus:

Hours after breakfast

A lingering aroma

The ghost of a toast

Toast dishes: Welsh Rarebit; Beans on Toast; Cinnamon Toast; Croque Monsieur; French Toast (or eggy bread); Walt Disney World's Tonga Toast, otherwise known as Polynesian Banana-Stuffed French Toast; toasted sandwiches.

Last slice: The act of raising a toast had its origins in tossing a cube of hot buttered toast into warm drinks. In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Sir John Falstaff demands more drinks, then adds: "Don't forget the toast".

Updated: 12:04 Saturday, February 17, 2001