TOAST . . . SOUL FOOD Comfort food is described as food that gives emotional comfort to the one eating it. Toast! When I was a child growing up in the Rocky Lane of Branch, I ate lots of good old homemade toast. Of course, it was homemade, as baker's bread had not yet reached our little shops. And of course, it was white bread as we knew absolutely nothing about the healthful attributes of whole wheat or whole grain or whatever. All we knew was that those big loaves, baked in an oven, fueled by wood, produced ideal slices for toasting. A plate, piled high with golden toast, that's what I remember about a winter's breakfast in the 1950s. It didn't pop up out of an electric toaster because the amenities of electricity never reached us until 1965. To toast five or six slices at once, someone just threw the bread on the surface of the piping hot stove and flipped them over to get the desired brownness. As you can imagine, there were times when the visibility in our kitchen was like the smoke room on the Kyle. The slower method of toasting was to raise the damper and use some kind of wire contraption to hold your slices over the open fire. Then smother it all with Good Luck margarine that had to be melted on a plate, on those cold winter mornings, because we weren't yet aware of the soft stuff. Wash it all down with hot tea and that my friends, was comfort food. We always had toast. We didn't have fresh fruits and fancy desserts or expensive steaks served with green salads, but we always had our toast. Oh, we had lots of local vegetables, fish, mutton, eggs and berries, but I don't think of them as comfort food.. On those nights when the full winter moon would shine its light on us, as we went sliding in the meadow, we would drag ourselves home tired, cold and hungry. Out would come the brown container of messy Fry's Cocoa. And what goes best with messy cocoa? We not only ate the toast, we dipped it into the steaming sugar-coated cocoa. I don't know if the toast made the cocoa taste so good or the cocoa made the toast slide deliciously down one's throat. Maybe, it was just the whole scenario, the togetherness, the fun and games that make me remember those simple snacks of toasted bread. When Branch finally moved in to the age of electricity, our household was blessed with one of those two-door toasters that you had to watch like a hawk so your bread wouldn't burn. My poor mother cindered more sliced bread than she ate. It didn't always go to waste because the hens didn't mind that it was a tad overdone. If the slice wasn't too black, it could be salvaged by scraping, and if you chased it down with a hot beverage, sometimes you wouldn't even get a hint of a burnt taste. Those little flip-side toasters, whatever became if them? I guess they were replaced by the pop-up types. Too bad. They were kind of cute and they didn't do a half-bad job if you monitored them closely. To write this article, I googled "toast" and found the list to include all kinds from French toast to garlic toast to cinnamon toast crunch. At our humble table, in our bungalow on the Hill, we knew none of these tasty offerings. It was plain old toast that hit the spot. When my sister, Cathy comes to visit, we do the toast thing. Before we go to bed, we sit at my kitchen table with our toast and tea and talk about Branch, always about Branch and the folks who were part of our happy childhood. Those late night chats, after we've played a hundred games of cards, take me back. Lord, I still love toast. It is truly food for the soul.   Submitted By: Marina Power-Gambin