If any country in the world was to excel at putting sugar on top of bread, you’d think it’d be America, the land of such breakfast delicacies as Pop-Tarts and Lucky Charms marshmallow cereal (both 30-something per cent sugar).
But for whatever reason, fairy bread has long eluded the Yanks. The internet seemed to “discover” it circa 2016, albeit with some very odd misconceptions:
• Crusty artisanal bread is acceptable
• Cultured butter is acceptable
• And whatever this is: “the toast is usually eaten as breakfast, as a snack in-between meals, or after dinner to finish off the meal”
Epicurious, the publication behind these spectacular misses, appears to have corrected the article a year later with quotes from Sydney food blogger Not Quite Nigella – perhaps in response to Broadsheet’s tongue-in-cheek broadside, American Mag Thinks Australians Live on a Diet of Fairy Bread. Of course, the original lives on thanks to the Internet Archive.
Last week the New York Times reignited the whole thing with a “recipe” for fairy bread by Ali Slagle, one of its most prolific and respected recipe developers.
True to form, she specifies white sandwich bread and round (not tubular) sprinkles in the ingredients list, plus a diagonal cut after. So far, so good. We’re less keen on her use of unsalted butter and her method of sprinkling the sprinkles over the bread, rather than turning the slice upside down and pressing it into a bed of sprinkles. (Some selfless Kiwis and Aussies in the comments have already voiced their concerns about these minor oversights.)
Okay. It took nearly a decade, but it looks like Americans have finally figured out fairy bread, even if the recipe serving size is a ludicrous single slice, rather than the customary whole loaf, and they think it takes 10 entire minutes to prepare that single slice.
But hang on, what’s that first sentence in the recipe introduction?
If you go to a children’s birthday party in Australia or New Zealand, you may not get birthday cake, but you are very likely to find fairy bread: triangles of untoasted white bread covered with margarine or butter and “hundreds and thousands” (known as sprinkles stateside).
Here’s the title of tomorrow’s broadside: American Newspaper Thinks Australians Don’t Eat Birthday Cake.
