A Taste of Home

British food writer Nigel Slater once claimed that it’s impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. I agree, but I’d add a caveat: as long as the toast on offer is hot enough to melt the butter without being completely charred. (It also helps if it’s dripping with honey, laden with peanut butter or covered in sweet lemon curd.)

While I was living in Beirut a few years ago, it was difficult to get toast. A few cafés reckoned to serve it, but it was a pale imitation: wafer-thin, tepid triangles of processed white bread with butter that literally would not melt. It was only here among the flatbreads, the za’atar-filled manouches and the handbag-shaped, sesame seed–riddled breads of the Levant that I began to realize just how key this simple staple was to my sense of home