I'd be interested to know if toast came before the end of the frequent consumption of stale bread.

Many of our recipes are based around using and eating stale bread, and in modern times require you to toast bread as most don't keep bread that has gone stale.

If you think of things like French Onion Soup, that traditionally used stale bread, not toasted bread.

So I wonder if toasting was a way to compensate for not having stale bread, or if folks were in fact toasting bread long before the norms changed.