The 90 Year Old Toaster

Many years ago now, I wrote a piece on what was then a 75 year old Toastmaster toaster that I'd rescued from the Goodwill discard bin and fixed up to use every day. It's by far the best toaster of the half-dozen or so we have these days. It was in storage in California for the past 9 years since we moved to New Mexico and it was one of the odds and ends that we had delivered here when we cleaned out the storage unit on what was probably my last trip to California last month.

And we've been using it to make toast pretty much every day since it arrived here.

It's a remarkable yet simple machine that in its day was very expensive. It's heavy -- certainly heavy compared to any toaster on the home market today. The cord is fabric wrapped and very sturdy, but when I picked the toaster out of the Goodwill bin the plug had been cut off and I had to find and attach a new one. It works fine now.

This toaster seems to work a little differently than more recent ones, and truth to tell, it makes better toast. Here's how I think this toasting miracle is accomplished:

The bread goes in the slots like any other toaster, but you have to push hard on the black lever there to make it go down, wind up the clock work and start the electric heating elements. The heating elements are encased in mica rather than being exposed, and they start to heat slowly rather than all at once. During the toasting cycle, the clockwork ticks cheerfully, and the lever slowly rises as time passes, but the toast stays in place till the end of the cycle. As the timer counts down, the heating elements get hotter and redder, till at the end of the cycle, they are cherry red and then the toast pops up done perfectly.

This perfection is, I think, accomplished by heating the bread before toasting it, and only toasting the outside of each slice at the very end of the cycle rather than toasting the bread through and through during the whole cycle -- which can dry out the bread and make it crispier and harder than ideal.

At least that's my theory of what's happening.

All I can say further is that the toast we make -- again -- in this toaster is good. Better than the toast from any other toaster we have or have ever had.

And it's nearly 90 years old.

Think about that for a moment or two.