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Milk Toast
Toast bread as for buttered toast. Dip each piece quickly in boiling water, place in baking-pan, and cover with scaled milk. Bake for fifteen minutes, and serve in soup-plates. The toast can also be served by putting piece of buttered bread which has been held over the steam, and covering with scalded milk.
An invalid-cookery standby that survives on technique rather than ingredients: dry toast, a fast dip in water, and hot milk poured over. The whole thing hinges on the milk being scalded but not boiled.
- Scalded milkHeat whole milk to about 180F, until it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge, then take it off the heat. Boiled milk tastes cooked and will skin over heavily as it sits.
- The water dipThe quick dip in boiling water is not optional padding. It softens the crust so the toast drinks the milk evenly instead of staying leathery underneath, and it should be a second or two at most.
- Oven settingNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated fifteen minutes will heat the milk through and set a light skin on top.
- Pan choiceUse a shallow baking dish just large enough to hold the slices in one layer, so the milk comes most of the way up the bread rather than swamping or stranding it.
- The second methodHolding buttered bread over steam and pouring scalded milk over it skips the oven entirely, so it is ready in a minute or two and comes out softer, since the bread is not toasted first.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt is worth adding; butter, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of sugar appear in other period versions of milk toast.
- BreadA plain white sandwich loaf cut about half an inch thick behaves best. Open, holey artisan bread collapses into the milk.
- Yield and servingAllow about two slices per person, and serve in soup plates as the recipe directs; warming the plates helps, since the dish cools fast. Eat it immediately; it will not hold.
Milk toast belonged to the sickroom and the nursery as much as the breakfast table, and it turns up in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books alongside gruel, beef tea and arrowroot as food for invalids, small children and the elderly. Its virtues were that it needed no fresh meat, no eggs, and nothing a household would not already have; stale bread became palatable and mildly nourishing with almost no fuel. A related dish is the British "pobs" or bread-and-milk fed to children.