Home › Village Receipts › Breakfast Toast
Breakfast Toast
Chop cold roast beef or ham, and cook in a little water; put in cream or milk, thicken and season with butter, pepper and salt, and pour over toast.
— Mrs. D. M. Post
A cream gravy of chopped leftover roast poured over toast — the ancestor of creamed chipped beef. The recipe assumes you know the proportions, so here they are.
- Working quantitiesAbout 1 cup finely chopped cold beef or ham to 1/2 cup water and 1 cup milk or cream will serve two on four slices of toast. Err on the generous side with the liquid, or the sauce will not coat the toast.
- "Cook in a little water"Just enough to cover the meat, simmered a minute or two to loosen it and pull out some flavor. The meat is already cooked; long boiling only makes it stringy.
- ThickeningNo thickener is named; flour was the usual choice, though crumbs or egg turn up in period sauces too. A tablespoon of flour rubbed into a tablespoon of the butter, stirred in and cooked a full minute, gives the right body without a raw-flour taste.
- Salt and hamIf you use ham, hold the salt until the end. Cured ham in a reduced cream sauce can carry the whole dish on its own.
- Cream versus milkCream needs less flour and is far less likely to break if it catches; whole milk wants gentler heat and constant stirring. Skim milk gives a thin, chalky sauce.
- The toastToast it dark and dry. Pale or soft toast goes to paste quickly under a cream sauce, so cut the bread on the thick side.
- ServingPlate and serve at once — this does not hold. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of the roast's own jelly is a period-appropriate addition.
Creamed meat on toast was one of the standard American breakfast dishes of the nineteenth century, a way of getting a second and third meal out of a Sunday roast in a household without refrigeration, where cooked meat had to be used up within a couple of days. The same formula appears under a number of names — creamed beef, minced beef on toast, and later the dried-beef version that the U.S. Army made famous — and the difference between them is mostly which scrap of meat was on hand. Its appearance here, credited to a named contributor, is typical of the community cookbook, a form in which the recipes gathered were generally the everyday ones of the neighborhood, and what was cooked on a Tuesday morning was often the remains of Sunday's joint. The instructions are terse.