Toast
For toast: Use Bread at least 24 hours old Otherwise, dry slices in oven before toasting Cut firm slices, removing crusts or not according to taste Toast over red coals or in oven TOAST is the great American "hot Bread" that gives every member of the family the right send-off for the day. In addition, it has a wide variety of uses: Cinnamon toast is delightful for afternoon tea or Sunday supper; children love the crunchy goodness of toast along with their milk and stewed fruit, and a bowl of steaming hot milk-toast helps solve the problem of the invalid's tray. Toast served under vegetables, game, or meats adds much to their attractiveness and food value. Dip the toast quickly in boiling water and sprinkle lightly with salt. Peas, succotash, beans, spinach, cauliflowerin fact almost all vegetables are made more tasty and healthful if served with toast.
Less a recipe than a short set of rules, and they are the right ones. The only instruction likely to surprise a modern cook is the dip in boiling water, which is meant for toast that will have something wet set on top of it.
- Day-old bread, and the reasonA fresh crumb holds too much water. It steams before it browns and comes out leathery instead of crisp. Twenty-four hours is the booklet’s figure, and drying the slices briefly in a low oven is the shortcut it offers for bread that has not had that long.
- Red coals or the ovenThe heat assumed here is radiant and open. A broiler is the nearest modern equivalent and gives the same slightly uneven, scorched-in-places surface. A dry cast-iron pan gives a different result and a good one. A pop-up toaster produces something more uniform than anything this kitchen could have managed.
- The boiling-water dipDipping finished toast quickly in boiling water and salting it softens the surface so that it takes up vegetable liquor rather than repelling it. It is for toast serving under peas, spinach, beans or succotash, not for toast eaten on its own, and it is easy to overdo. In and out; no soaking.
- Cinnamon toast and milk toastBoth are named and neither is explained. Cinnamon toast is buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. Milk toast is toast broken into a bowl of hot milk, which is why the booklet files it under the invalid’s tray. Neither needed a recipe then, which is presumably why neither got one.
- Toast as a base, not a sideSeveral of the uses listed put the toast underneath the food: vegetables, game, meats. That calls for a slice cut thick enough to carry a wet topping without going to pieces, toasted hard, and laid down at the last moment. Cut it thin and it has dissolved by the time the plate reaches the table.
Toast earns a page in a yeast booklet because of arithmetic. The sponge method a few pages earlier makes four large loaves at a time, which is more bread than a household eats while it is still fresh, and this page is what happens to the rest. The uses listed sketch the home it was written for: a family breakfast, a sick room with its own tray of milk toast, children given toast alongside milk and stewed fruit, and dinner plates on which game and vegetables arrive sitting on a slice. Toast here is not a snack or a vehicle for jam. It is a structural part of three meals and the mechanism by which nothing baked at the start of the week is thrown away at the end of it.