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BEEFSTEAK TOAST
Chop cold steak or tongue very fine, cook in a little water, put in cream or milk, thicken, season with butter, salt, and pepper, and pour it over slices of toast. Prepare boiled ham in the same way, adding the yolk of an egg.
BREAKFAST PUFFs may be made on baking day, by taking up a little dough, pulling out to thickness of doughnuts, cut two and one-half inches in length, drop in boiling lard, and fry like doughnuts; to be eaten with butter like biscuit.
SHELLED ALMONDS are more economical for use in cakes. One pound of unshelled almonds only makes six and one-half ounces or one coffe-cupful when shelled, while the unshelled are generally only double the price, and sometimes not that per pound.
This is a leftovers entry: cold cooked steak, tongue or ham turned into a creamed hash over toast. No quantities are given anywhere, so treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Working proportionsAbout 2 cups finely chopped cooked meat, a scant 1/2 cup water, and 1 cup milk or cream will serve four over eight slices of toast. Thicken with roughly 2 tablespoons flour and 2 tablespoons butter.
- "Thicken" means flourThe recipe leaves the thickener unspecified; flour, either rubbed into butter or slaked in cold milk, is the likeliest intent. Add it off the boil and whisk, or the sauce will go lumpy; a butter-and-flour roux cooked a minute first gives a cleaner flavour.
- Do not boil the meat longThe steak is already cooked. Simmer only until it is heated through and the sauce has body, five minutes at most. Extended cooking dries out cold beef and turns tongue grainy.
- The egg yolk in the ham versionBeat the yolk with a little of the hot sauce first, then stir it back in off the heat. Returned to a boil it will curdle rather than thicken.
- Salt with a light handBoiled ham and cured tongue are both salty already. Season at the end, after the cream has gone in.
- Breakfast puffsThese are scraps of bread dough, rolled to about doughnut thickness and cut in 2 1/2-inch lengths, deep-fried. The book says only "boiling lard": fry in hot fat as you would doughnuts, turning once. They are yeast-risen, not a batter puff, and the recipe has them made on baking day, from dough already in hand.
- The almond noteStill broadly true: a pound in the shell yields only about 6 1/2 ounces shelled, roughly two-fifths of the original weight. The "coffee-cupful" here is being equated with 6 1/2 ounces, which is a weight, not a reliable volume measure for chopped or ground almonds.
Buckeye Cookery handles fragments, and this entry is a fair sample of its logic: yesterday's steak, the end of a tongue, the last of a boiled ham, all rescued by cream sauce and a slice of toast. Creamed meat on toast was a fixture of American breakfast and supper tables through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, where it survived in institutional and military cooking under blunter names. Tongue appears here as an ordinary joint rather than a delicacy. The almond note has nothing to do with the dish and everything to do with the book's purpose: comparative price-per-pound arithmetic, printed for a reader expected to check the grocer's figures herself.