One of mum’s favourite things that always reminded her of some delightful times from her youth was toast cut “Hotel Midland” as she called it.
 
This was one of mum’s favourite things to have with smoked salmon or salmon paté or the like, and I had to agree, she had excellent taste in this – it really made the whole thing so much crunchier and I think it even helped it to feel a bit more refined!
 
This meant toasting the bread lightly and then cutting the toast in half (the difficult way) so that one got 2 really thin pieces of toast, and then toasting them again, being extremely careful not to let them burn, which could so easily happen.  You might recognise this as “melba toast” of course. The recipe was a creation of the chef August Escoffier, if one's interested.
 
I think mum remembered it from her twenties and going to some rather fancy dinner dances (IIRC) with the whole spectacle of the events as well as the décor of the hotel having made an impression.  If you want to see some of what it looks like now (which hopefully also reflects aspects of how it looked then), there are a couple of pictures below and you can also find their website at https://www.themidlandhotel.co.uk/