Hillbilly French Toast

(by Christie Chapman)

Author's reading

For the longest time, whenever I ordered French toast at a restaurant, I’d look down at the gussied-up, egg-battered bread the server placed before me and think: “Where’s the Kraft American cheese?”

The version of that brunch mainstay, that Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed-tray classic, that I grew up with wasn’t made with brioche, or challah, or any kind of fancy bread. My mom used regular old sandwich bread, the same kind she used for her three kids’ and husband’s brown-bag lunches. (Apple butter for me; PB&J for my sister; peanut butter and banana for my dad, the health nut; ham and ketchup for my brother, the weirdo.) As in most recipes for French toast, she sopped each slice in a little bowl of egg with a splash of milk and a sprinkling of salt.

But the pièce de résistance, my mom’s stroke of inadvertent culinary brilliance, born of Appalachian ingenuity and, perhaps, a lack of exposure to dairy that was not processed and tinted a perfect Crayola hue, factory-molded into uniform squares and encased in an envelope of see-through plastic:

A slice of Kraft American cheese, placed atop the French-toast slice while still warm. Top with a non-miserly pour of maple syrup (or Log Cabin maple-flavored corn syrup is fine; that’s what we used) and, if that’s not decadent enough, a bluster of powdered sugar.

If my mom’s version of French toast were to go into a cookbook of the world’s recipes, preserved in some nuclear-proof capsule for aliens to discover someday, a reliquary of Earth’s gustatory delights, her recipe would be found behind the tab marked: “Don’t Knock It ‘Till You Try It.”

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I used to think of my mom’s French toast as just one of her hillbilly-transplant quirks, an anecdote to illustrate how un-cosmopolitan our upbringing was.

My parents are from working-class Appalachia, with the requisite stories about moonshiners in the family tree and the snake-handlers’ church down in the holler. For hundreds of years, both sides of my family lay nestled in the same pocket of southwestern Virginia near the Tennessee line. What happened was that my dad was the smartest kid at his school, winner of the science fair, building robots in his basement. He went to college and became an engineer. There were no engineer jobs where my parents are from.

So my dad came up to the big city, to Washington, D.C., and he brought my mom with him. They lived in a tiny apartment at first; my mom walked down Route 1 to her job as a cashier at Zayre, a competitor to Kmart. Then my dad moved up the ladder and they saved up their money. They built one house, then another. The last one they built is the only childhood home I remember, and they still live there. I never knew anything else, but they did.

To give you an idea of what kind of neighborhood we lived in, it might help to know that my brother had a friend whose family had live-in staff (“servants,” the friend called them). One house had an indoor pool; others had private boat docks. At least two of the houses were so palatial, they had names—Seven Oaks was the home of my sister’s kindergarten boyfriend, where they still hold a White House-style egg hunt every Easter. Millionaires lived there, back when it meant something to be a millionaire. A famously disgraced presidential campaign manager lived there; my siblings and I saw his daughters at the bus stop.

It was the kind of place that wanted you to know it was rich, from the plaque at the entrance with the manicured hedges to the name-dropping chitchat at the HOA functions: whose kid got into which Ivy League school; did you hear that Tom Selleck put in a bid on that house by the marina?

And my family were the resident Beverly Hillbillies, my dad playing banjo on the front porch, my brother’s red Trans Am bought cheap off someone’s yard in my parents’ hometown, my dad’s accent that made him pronounce my brother Brian’s name like “bran,” my own unawareness—until ninth grade—that “naked” was not pronounced “nekkid.”

But most of all, in a sad inverse of the Eleanor Roosevelt quote about how no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, there was my mom’s sense of inadequacy and bumpkin-ness around the other women in our neighborhood. Naturally shy in the first place, even back home, my mom would peek through our windows to check for them—the old-money, silver-haired woman across the street and her friend walking a fluffy white bichon frisé; the bottle-blonde, Type A realtor whose face, along with her realtor husband’s, was plastered on the toddler-seat flaps at our grocery store. If the coast was clear, my mom would get the mail or water her flowerbed. Only then.

From my vantage point now, decades after I last lived in my parents’ house, here in a home of my own in a very different HOA (no live-in staff or houses with names), I can more fully see what a shame it was that my mom felt the way she did. She might not have had a debutante ball or used the word “lunch” as a verb, but she’s a gifted poet (even if unpublished), a generous and caring soul, whose back-home friends could attest to her wonderfully warped sense of humor. On our fridge, we kept a running list of all the jokey epitaphs my mom requested over the years for us to inscribe on her gravestone— “I told you I was sick.” “Pepperoni and cheese” (from a Tombstone frozen-pizza commercial, when a man before a firing squad was asked what he would like on his tombstone). It would take a tomb the size of a pharaoh’s to include them all.

I can see what a shame it was that those ladies didn’t know her.

When I think of my mom’s French toast now, I can’t help seeing a metaphor: Here’s my mom trying her hand at French toast, not a food she grew up with, not an Appalachian specialty, but rather her attempting something fancy, more the domain of hifalutin’ city folk with their eggs Benedict and mimosas. Here’s my mom, inside the four-columned mansion she rarely left, taking that fancy food and melting a slice of Kraft American cheese on top—the People’s Cheese, the only kind you’d find in a house like ours, where dinner was accompanied by back-to-back reruns of “Roseanne.” Taking a stab at that fancy food, but making it more to her liking, de-froufrouing it a bit. Making it her own. I admire her for that, and I maintain that—to my taste buds, at least—the best French toast is her kind.

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Christie Chapman is a writer and mom who lives in Springfield, Virginia. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Ghost Parachute, ARTWIFE, and elsewhere. She can be found on Instagram.

French Toast with American Cheese

sliced bread (sandwich kind is fine)

1 egg

whole milk

salt

American cheese slices (“singles” in Kraft parlance)

butter or margarine, enough to grease a frying pan

maple syrup

optional: powdered sugar

Into a small bowl (about the size you’d use for cereal), crack an egg.

Swish around with a fork, mostly to break the yolk.

Add a splash of milk and a sprinkling of salt.

Sop the bread slice, back and front, in the egg mixture.

In a frying pan, melt a pat of butter or margarine.

Cook both sides until the bread looks “French toast-y.”

While bread is still warm, drape one slice of American cheese onto each toast.

Let melt.

Top with maple syrup.

Add powdered sugar if it’s a special occasion or you are otherwise feeling fancy.