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Excellent Toast
Cut slices of a uniform thickness, of half an inch; move around over a brisk fire, to have all parts toasted alike; keep only so near the coals that the pieces will be heated through when both sides are well browned. If the slightest point is blackened or charred, scrape it off, or it will spoil the flavor of the whole. If covered with an earthen bowl, it will keep both warm and moist. A clean towel or napkin will answer if it is to go at once to the table. Stale bread may be used for milk-toast; sour bread may be improved by toasting it through, but sweet, light bread, only a day old or less, makes the best toast.
This is toast made over open coals, and nearly every instruction in it is about heat management that a pop-up toaster now handles automatically. What survives is the advice about the bread itself.
- The hinge: heat through, not just brownThe point of holding the slice a little back from the coals is to warm the interior before the surface colors. In a modern toaster this is the difference between a light-to-medium setting run a bit longer and a dark setting run fast; the latter gives a scorched face over cool, doughy crumb.
- "A brisk fire"A good, active heat; the text does not say whether flame or bare coals. Under a broiler the nearest equivalent is a moderately high setting with the rack far enough down that the crumb warms before the surface colors, watched constantly.
- Half-inch slicesAt or slightly above the thickness of ordinary sliced sandwich bread, and thicker than thin-sliced loaves. A half-inch slice off a bakery loaf is what this method assumes, and it is why heating through matters.
- Scraping the charSound advice, not fussiness. Burnt crumb carries a bitter, acrid flavor that spreads through butter and into milk toast; a table knife drawn across the black spots takes it off.
- The earthen bowlAn inverted stoneware bowl traps steam and keeps the slices soft. If you want crisp toast, do the opposite and stand the slices upright in a rack so the moisture escapes, which is exactly what a toast rack is for.
- Sour breadBread beginning to turn from over-fermentation or age, not sourdough. Toasting may drive off some of the more volatile acids and mask the rest. Bread with any visible mold should be discarded rather than toasted.
- Milk-toastReferenced here as a use for stale bread: toasted slices soaked in hot, lightly salted and buttered milk. It is a common dish in cookbooks of this period, often recommended for invalids and children.
Before the electric toaster, toast was a fireside operation done on a long-handled fork or a hinged wire toaster set before the grate, and the resulting quality depended entirely on the cook's judgment of distance and time. That is why a book like Buckeye Cookery (which began as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, Marysville, Ohio, 1876, and appeared in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping from the Buckeye Publishing Co. in Minneapolis) devotes a full entry to something no modern cookbook would bother to explain. The emphasis on scraping off char reflects a period preoccupation with burnt bread as both unpalatable and unwholesome. The closing note that day-old bread makes the best toast is still correct, and for the reason the writer implies rather than states — fresh bread is too moist to crisp evenly, while thoroughly stale bread has lost the interior softness that makes good toast worth eating.