Even those of you with minimal kitchen skills can make toast. All you need to do is check the setting on your toaster, drop in two slices of bread, and in a matter of minutes you have toast. If you’re a “retro grouch,” you can bake your own bread and slice it, but, remember, you’re doing that because you want to, not because you have to.

But as you can see by looking at the early 19th century iron, making toast wasn’t always so simple a task. You had to:

1. Bake your own bread. (Even in 1900, only 25 percent of the bread consumed in the United States was commercially baked.)
2. Make sure that the fire in your fireplace was at the proper strength.
3. Stand there and watch the toast to be sure it didn’t burn.
4. And then, if you wanted to spread butter or jam on your toast, you needed to think of it well in advance because you had to make it yourself.

Phew! Let’s not even think about what it would take to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

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