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Buttered Toast
Although toast is commonly used, few know how to prepare it nicely. Take bread not too fresh, cut thin and evenly, trim off the crust-edges for the crumb-jar; first warm each side of the bread, then present the first side again to the fire until it takes on a rich, even, brown color; treat the other side in the same way; butter and serve immediately. The coals should be bright and hot. Toast properly made is very digestible, because all the moisture is extracted, and the bread has become pure farina of wheat; but when it is exposed to a hot fire and the outside charred, the inside remains as moist as ever, and butter applied to it while warm does not penetrate, but floats on the surface in the form of rancid oil. Or, beat one cup of butter and three table-spoons flour to a cream, pour over this one and a half pints boiling water; place over a kettle of boiling water for ten minutes, dip into it the toast, and serve hot. Or, dip each slice of toast in boiling hot water (slightly salted), spread with butter, cover and keep hot.
Three methods in one entry: dry toast done properly, toast dipped in a butter sauce, and toast dipped in salted water. The instructions are sound apart from the chemistry lesson in the middle.
- The hinge: warm both sides firstThe whole method rests on drying the slice through before you brown it — warm side one, warm side two, then return to the heat to colour. Rushed high heat chars the surface while the crumb stays damp, which is exactly the failure the original describes.
- "The coals should be bright and hot"This is toasting on a fork or wire toaster in front of an open fire or range. Under a broiler, set the rack about 4 inches down and turn the slices twice as directed; a toaster on a low-to-medium setting run through twice achieves the same staged drying.
- Bread"Not too fresh" means a day or two old, cut thin and evenly; the recipe gives no thickness. Modern pre-sliced sandwich bread is much softer, and a thin, soft slice may dry out completely if given the full double treatment.
- The crumb-jarThe recipe sends the trimmed crusts to a jar of dried crumbs kept for coating and thickening. It serves the household crumb supply rather than the toast itself; skip it or keep the crusts on.
- The butter sauce, scaledOne cup butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1 1/2 pints (3 cups) boiling water make about a quart of thin butter sauce — enough for a large family breakfast. A quarter of that, about 4 tablespoons butter, 2 teaspoons flour and 3/4 cup water, suits four slices.
- Over boiling water, not on the burnerThe ten minutes in a double boiler cook out the raw flour without breaking the emulsion. On direct heat this very butter-heavy sauce can separate into butter and floury water.
- The chemistry is wrongToasting drives off surface moisture and browns starch and protein; it does not convert bread to "pure farina of wheat," and toast is no more digestible than bread in any meaningful sense. The practical advice that follows from it is still correct.
- ServingThe dipped versions go soft within a minute or two, so plate and cover them at once.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, growing out of an earlier Ohio compilation, and it still assumes bright coals rather than an oven for toast. The dipped variants belong to a family of nineteenth-century American invalid and nursery dishes — milk toast, cream toast, water toast — in which a slice of stale bread is softened in hot liquid to make it easy to eat and to stretch a little butter across a lot of bread. The scolding tone is characteristic of the book, which devotes considerable space to correcting bad habits as well as to giving quantities.