Toast Apéritif

A French toast apéritif starts under the grill an hour before the first guest rings the bell. Rounds of pain de mie, cut with a glass or a pastry cutter, go onto a tray and stay there until the white turns pale gold, a few minutes in a hot oven, and baguette coins about a centimetre thick, brushed with olive oil, take longer and come out with a rim of real crust. The slice is dried on purpose. Moisture driven out of the crumb lets a wet spread sit on top of the bread instead of sinking into it, so the toast arrives at the first bite still brittle. Fresh from the tray the rounds tick and crackle as they cool, and the kitchen smells of browned flour. That is the entire preparation of the base. Everything after it is one spoonful.

Tapenade is the spread most people picture. Black olives, capers and anchovies are pounded to a coarse paste with olive oil, and the name comes from tapéno, the Provençal word for caper. A teaspoon on a round that is still faintly warm lets the oil loosen, and the smell rises briny and resinous with an anchovy edge. The first bite snaps audibly, crumbs fall onto a shirt front, and the salt arrives all at once, which is why a glass of rosé or pastis is already in the other hand. Quantity is small by design. The toast is meant to be finished in two bites, so the paste has to be strong enough to taste through a dry slice and thin enough that it never reaches the edge.

Rillettes and fresh goat cheese show what temperature does to the same base. Rillettes of pork or duck, the potted shredded meat of Tours and the Sarthe, set hard in the fridge and tear a toast if spread cold, so they sit out for twenty minutes or so and get worked loose with a fork. On the warm round the fat softens at the edges and glistens, and the first mouthful is rich, savoury and slightly sweet from the long-cooked meat. Chèvre frais goes the other way: whipped with chives, olive oil, black pepper and a little lemon, it stays cool and tangy against the heat of the toast, and a cold smear on a warm crust is the clearest contrast the format offers. Anchoïade, crushed anchovy with garlic and oil, can go on and slide under the grill for a minute so the garlic perfumes the room.

The apéro itself decides how these are made. In France the hour before dinner is a standing meal of small things, and the toasts compete on the table with olives, saucisson and bowls of crisps, so each one has to earn a place in a single mouthful. A tray is topped in a batch at the last minute, since a spread softens the crust from above within a quarter of an hour or so, and the plate is empty before that matters. Hosts who skip the oven buy the base: dry toasted rounds in a packet are a standard supermarket item, sold for exactly this, and the cook's contribution shrinks to the spoon. At Christmas the same rounds, in a sweeter brioche version, carry foie gras and a dab of fig chutney or onion confit.

Seasons move the toppings and leave the base alone. Summer brings sliced tomato with basil oil, or a ribbon of courgette over chèvre. Autumn has fig and a curl of dry-cured ham, or a walnut pressed into the cheese. Winter and the end-of-year parties favour smoked salmon with cream and dill, the toast turned a little more formal for a table with a tablecloth. A crisp round also takes sardine rillettes or a thin spread of Roquefort and honey without any change to the cutting or the heat. Whatever sits on top, the tray goes around at the same speed and the toasts are gone in the same time.

A Word, a Paste and a Patent

The word is older in English than in French. French dictionaries give toast as a borrowing from English for pain grillé, itself descended from the old French toster, to roast, and they note that cooks once said rôtie for a slice of bread grilled and buttered. The nineteenth century, under British influence on the table, is the period when toast settled into French kitchens, and the plural toasts is now the apéro vocabulary for anything small on a slice of bread.

The best-documented topping is tapenade. A chef named Meynier is credited with the paste in 1880 at the Maison Dorée in Marseille, an attribution that traces to J.-B. Reboul's La Cuisinière provençale of 1897, and that first version is usually described as a garnish for egg rather than a spread for toast. Nothing in these sources dates the moment a spoonful of any spread first met a crisp round at an apéritif table, and no record names a cook, a bar or a year for the toast apéritif as a dish.

What can be dated is the bread. Philibert Jacquet opened a bakery at 92 rue de Richelieu in Paris in 1880, filed a patent for toasted bread in 1885, began selling it beyond his own shop about three years later, and received a gold medal for it at the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris. Bread that arrived already dried and ready to top is the ancestor of the shop-bought round. The Jacquet brand still sells a brioche loaf cut for toasts, and its packet of round slices, 36 to a 250 g bag by one retail listing, now sits in French supermarkets a few shelves from the olives it is made to carry.