1971–present · reviewed, out of five slices, by Bernard Achterberg
I have owned eleven toasters. A toaster is with you every morning of your life, at the worst time of day, when you are least able to defend yourself, and it is either kind to you or it is not. They deserve to be remembered properly. Here are eight of them. Three I will not discuss.
Ratings are out of five slices. I don't give out five slices lightly. I have given out five slices twice.
The left slot always burned. Always. I learned to put my bread on the right. You could say the Royale was faulty. I say it taught me to adapt, and that a thing can be wrong on one side and right on the other and still be worth keeping. The lever had a thunk like a car door on a good car.
It worked. That's all I'll say. Some toasters are just toasters, and there's no shame in it. (See 2012.)
Never burned a single slice in eleven years. Not one. Dial on 4, every time, perfect, the colour of a good bookshelf. When it died I didn't buy another toaster for a month. I ate bread as bread. It was a hard month. I don't recommend it, but I understand myself better for it.
Set off the smoke alarm nine times in three weeks. I took it back. The man at the store asked me what was wrong with it. I said, "You know what's wrong with it." He did. He gave me my money back without another word. I think about that man sometimes.
Four slots for two people. Optimistic. We used two and the other two were for guests, who didn't come as often as the toaster hoped. My niece Lorna stayed with us the month before her big video game tournament in '03 and practised her breathing every morning in front of it while the bread went down. She came second. She says the snack-bar toaster at the hall that day was a disgrace. I went to watch, and I saw it, and she's right.
Glass sides. You can watch it happen. I watched it happen every morning for eight years. It's better than television and it's over in two minutes and nobody dies. It would have been five slices if the glass hadn't been impossible to clean.
It had an app. A toaster with an app. One morning it wanted to install an update before it would make toast. I stood in my kitchen in my dressing gown and negotiated with a toaster. Then I unplugged it, and we never spoke again.
They reissued the 1979 Kellner, the same beige one, and I bought it to find out whether I'd been unfair to it. I had. It's a very good toaster. It was always a very good toaster. I was younger and I wanted chrome. I've apologised to it. That's my second five slices, and I mean it more than the first.
People talk about browning settings and slot width. Those matter. But the lever is the toaster's handshake. You press it down and it either goes down like it means it, with a click you can feel in your elbow, or it goes down like it's doing you a favour. A good lever makes you feel that the day has started on purpose. I have held on to toasters with bad heating elements because of a good lever. I'm not ashamed of that.
In 2008 a man at the Complaints Dept. filed Complaint #1,812, about a toaster that toasts one side more than the other: "This is not balance. This is favouritism." I wrote to him with four thousand words on the Brightway Royale's left slot and what it had taught me. He filed Complaint #1,813, about the length of my reply. We have corresponded ever since. He has never once agreed with me, and he reads every word, and that's friendship.
Tell me about your toaster. Its name if it has one, how long you've had it, what the lever's like. I read every entry. If it's a sad story, I'm sorry, and I'll understand.