1pg essays: French Toast
Every single developer of Expedition 33 was knighted (Chevalier) due to their contributions towards the global perception of French culture. Meaning, they made the French cool again. There's something to the propagandic damnation of French culture in western media, often framing them as cowardly or effeminate or cold natured—whatever they could do to turn the entirety of the world against the French.
But they didn't get the toast.
Everyone fucking loves French toast.
Probably because it was invented by the Romans.
But I digress:
French toast is less something feasible, and more an ideal. It always feels like a simple thing: mix eggs, spices, and sugars into a bowl, dredge a piece of toast, fry it up and you're done! Except you're also dowsing it in honey or syrup. Sometimes your toast is soggy, sometimes its fluffy, sometimes its flat. It takes far less steps than pancakes or waffles, yet is far easier to mess up. There's a theoretical perfect french toast, but it feels like approaching limits in algebra: you'll always approach 1, but never achieve it. The food we were promised and sold on television and commercials is ultimately constructed with lies and plaster, with paint and acetate.
Chasing a good French Toast means chasing a facsimile of perfection, and is ultimately a lesson in the futility of the chase itself. But what are we not, if not chasers of ideals? Yearners? We are promised the world over through advertisements and television of products that'll never exist, yet persist in our goals regardless.
I like my french toast simple, battered with flour and cinnamon, sprinkled with powder sugar and condensed milk, and served with a handful of bacon strips. If I'm feeling adventurous I'll even have a dip of maple syrup nearby.
It's fascinating as the world has ultimately simplified pancakes and waffles, offering batters and mixes for simplicity, and frozen pucks for the lazy. But french toast exists in the realm of the analogue: you might have bread, milk, flour, cinnamon, but no place will sell you grocery level french toast batter. The closest I've found is Berthelet Batter Mix French Toast, which you can buy 6kg for 266 usd! Commercial grade. To french toast, you must make it yourself, with your own touch, and at your own peril.
I do not desire being reminded of my imperfections. But in a world of commercialization and minimalism, french has an analogue feel. It feels like your grandmother's breakfast. It feels like a diner at the end of a long drive. Nostalgia. A cinnamon powdered embrace. No machine could truly make a good french toast that everyone will love. The imperfections of one's flips, the uniqueness of the heat of the pan and the time in which you fry it, the sweat that is accidentally added in the dish and mistaken as the secret ingredient known as love... That is, and always will be alien to a machine.
A machine will give us perfection.
We will find it lacking.
Even knowing that french toast is not even truly french, even that imperfect detail is given to its myth. It is ultimately an ideal unrealized. And we like it that way.
- Di.