Just finished this book, and also bought the Kitchen Diaries by the same author - which is a record of what he ate for a year, plus recipies of course. Toast is a different sort of book, more memoir, unless you really want to assemble food from packets and tins (it was the 60s). The chapters are organised by food items, many of them sweet treats, and it is a rather sad book of his childhood. His mum is a bad cook who often burnt toast, but it is still the "best toast in the world''. After she dies, his dad remarries their cleaning woman (so much for The sound of Music - remarriage for the kids is not as easy as these films make out). So even though the house is filled with the smell of ham steaks and pies, it is the loneliness that comes through most.