When bread is browned it is called toast, and people began writing about toast bread in the 16th century.
At that time, toast wasn’t meant to be eaten at all. Rather, it was used as a flavouring for drinks.
Lodowick Lloyd’s text: “The Pilgrimage of Princes”, 1573, describes this:
Alphonsus took a toast out of his cuppe,
and cast it to the Dogge.
As well as being a flavouring for drink, toast was also used to warm drinks. In that case, the toast had to be warm or hot, so that when it was dipped into a glass of drink, the drink would become warm.
Even as late as the 17th century people didn’t eat toast but put it into drinks.
In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff says:
Go, fetch a quart of Sacke, put a toast in ‘t.
But in the 18th century some food innovator, having a piece of toast and a drink served together, decided to eat the toast, instead of putting it into the drink to flavour or warm it.
