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GOOD TOAST
Toast slices of bread, scrape off any blackened, charred portion; lay on a soup-plate, pour on cold milk enough to wet through, and leave half an inch or so in depth of milk in the plate. Good milk, with a little extra cream in it, is all the better, and a very trifle of salt improves it. Put over the toast thus prepared, an inverted large earthen bowl, or tin basin, large enough to cover it and set down upon the plate all round. Put this in a warm, not very hot, stove oven, two, three, or more hours in advance. The milk will cook and evaporate and its substance be condensed in the toast, while the cover will keep the toast moist. It is then very good without butter, though a little may be used if desired.
Milk toast baked under a cover rather than served in a bowl of hot milk — the point is to drive the milk into the bread until it is soft the whole way through but not swimming. Two things need translating: the oven and the timing.
- The hinge: the coverThe inverted bowl is what makes this work, trapping steam so the toast hydrates evenly instead of drying at the edges. Any heatproof bowl or a tight foil dome that seats flat on the plate rim will do; the plate and cover must both be oven-safe, which excludes a modern soup plate with metallic trim.
- "Warm, not very hot" ovenThe book gives no temperature, only a slow corner of a range, which is why it allows three hours or more. Hold milk-soaked bread at low warming heat for hours and you are incubating it, not cooking it. Use 300F and give it 30 to 45 minutes.
- BreadWhite sandwich bread, cut thick and toasted dark enough to hold its structure. Modern soft loaves collapse into paste; a firmer white bread or a plain sourdough holds up. The instruction to scrape off char presumably reflects toasting before a fire, where scorching was easy.
- Milk quantity"Enough to wet through" plus half an inch standing in the plate is more than it sounds; expect well over a cup for two slices in a soup plate, and top up rather than skimp. The extra cream is worth doing — the recipe asks for it directly, so whole milk with a splash of heavy cream.
- Salt"A very trifle" means a pinch, and it matters more than it sounds. Unsalted milk-soaked bread is genuinely flat; an eighth of a teaspoon lifts the whole thing.
- YieldTwo slices in a soup plate makes about one serving; the book does not specify. Eat it warm from the dish.
Milk toast belongs to the old category of invalid cookery — the food a household made for someone recovering from fever, childbirth or surgery, at a time when nursing happened at home and diet was one of the few treatments anyone could offer. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in the 1870s and reprinted through the century) sets aside a whole "Food For The Sick" section for this sort of thing: gruels, beef tea, panada, barley water, arrowroot. The logic behind them was that a weakened stomach wanted soft, bland, warm food with as little chewing as possible, and bread plus milk was the cheapest way to get calories into someone who would not eat. The baked-under-a-bowl method here is a refinement on the more common version, where hot milk is simply poured over toast at the table; slow heat lets the bread absorb the milk rather than float in it. The dish outlived its medical purpose and survived well into the twentieth century as a children's supper and a comfort food, which is roughly where it sits now.