Cinnamon Toast

I think it was at Pierce Camp Birchmont. I was somewhere under the age of twelve, I suspect, but maybe not. Birchmont was where our parents sent us for eight weeks during the summers; we always believed it was for our benefits and pleasure, though in no small part were their motives selfless: eight weeks without children in the house after 44 weeks with them is no small vacation! They would, of course, visit us at least once during the summer—usually after four weeks had passed, and they even had begun to miss us a bit.

Camp was lovely for me, actually. There was the usual daily activities and rivalries, but on the whole summers at Birchmont were pleasurable and deeply satisfying to this young boy; except for the fact that Roy Fliegenheimer could do a perfect imitation of Donald Duck which would earn him all kinds of attention and social accolade, I don’t remember an unpleasant moment in the several summers I was in attendance. I had my first taste of innocent, sexual attraction to a girl named, I think, Denise.

But one sharp detail returns consistently in my memory: the breakfasts that consisted of cinnamon toast. That was it, just cinnamon toast, juice (though I suspect this latter might have been a variety of what we termed ‘bug juice’) and milk. The toast would arrive at the table in woven baskets (though they might have been baskets of red plastic), filled with deliciously aromatic whole bread slices cut on the diagonal. We could see the toasted mounds of cinnamon and sugar, and our mouths began tasting even before our plates were filled. Every one at the table (eight to a table usually) would get two pieces at the outset, and when the basket had been emptied, we were allowed to send back for seconds. On a good day, on a very good day, we returned for a third portion.

I don’t know how they made it, because I have never been able to reproduce the taste or the texture of this very special breakfast delight. I couldn’t make this myself, though not for lack of trying, because I lacked some very essential ingredients: summer and the Camp Birchmont dining hall. I recognize this now, and have almost ceased trying to duplicate the delicacy. I do keep trying to feed my children on my childhood. But the perfect tastes of buttered white bread toast, topped with cinnamon and sugar, and baked mostly to perfection (or was it simply placed briefly under the broilers?), served hot and just short of plentiful, opened the day with magnificence and delight, and even all my petty jealousies dissolved for the moments in the sweetness of that cinnamon toast breakfast.