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Buttered Toast
Prepare bread as for Dry Toast, and spread with butter as soon as taken from toaster.
A two-line entry that depends entirely on the preceding "Dry Toast" recipe and on knowing what a 1900s kitchen meant by a toaster. Worth reading for the one point it does make: butter goes on hot, not warm.
- "Toaster" is not an applianceIn a book of this date a toaster is most likely a wire frame or rack held over coals, or a hinged holder set on the range. A modern broiler, or an electric toaster, will do the same job, and the timing point below still applies.
- Dry toast firstThe cross-referenced method means bread dried and browned through rather than merely coloured on the surface. Day-old bread behaves better than fresh, which steams and goes limp under its own moisture.
- Butter it hotThis is the whole point of the recipe. Butter spread on toast straight from the heat melts into the crumb; butter on toast that has been left to cool sits on the surface instead. Have the butter soft and to hand before the bread goes on.
- Don't stack or coverTrapped steam undoes the drying you just did. Toast stands upright in a rack, not flat on a plate under a napkin, unless a deliberately soft slice is wanted.
- Butter quantityThe recipe gives none. A teaspoon or so to a slice is a reasonable modern guess for eating plain, and less if the toast is going under a rich sauce.
Toast was structural in turn-of-the-century American cooking: the repertoire of creamed and scalloped things needed something absorbent underneath, and toast was cheaper and quicker than pastry or rice. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, in the era when candy and cocoa firms published general cookbooks as advertising, and the period saw a fashion, roughly from the 1890s into the 1900s, for cooking at the table over a spirit lamp, a form of entertaining associated with late suppers and college rooms. The word toast itself comes through Old French from Latin torrere, to parch or scorch, and the practice of drying bread at the fire is far older than any recipe book, having served as a way of making stale loaves palatable and of flavouring drinks.