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Cream Toast
Prepare in the same way as Milk Toast, substituting cream for milk.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the Milk Toast entry it points back to: toast dried in the oven or over heat, then dressed with a hot thin white sauce made from butter, flour and milk, seasoned with salt. Substituting cream changes the handling more than the line suggests.
- Reduce the thickeningA thin white sauce of the period is generally about 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid. Cream carries its own body, so the same proportion can turn pasty; consider roughly half the flour, or none at all if the cream is heavy and simply reduced with butter and salt.
- Cream then and now"cream" sold by the dairy at this date was often nearer today's light cream or half-and-half than the roughly 36 percent heavy cream of a supermarket carton, though richness varied a good deal and was not standardised. Half-and-half is likely to give a closer result.
- The hinge: do not let it boilCream held at a hard boil over direct heat can scorch at the edges. Keep it just below a simmer, and use a water jacket if the pan has one.
- The toast mattersBread dried through rather than merely browned on the surface absorbs liquid without collapsing, which is generally what these sop dishes want. Day-old bread, cut fairly thick and toasted slowly, is a reasonable reading, though the recipe specifies nothing.
- SeasoningIf the base recipe is salt only, a grating of nutmeg or a little white pepper is period-appropriate in dishes of this kind.
Milk toast and its richer cousin cream toast belong to the long tradition of sop dishes — bread softened in hot liquid — and by the late nineteenth century they had settled into two specific niches in American households: the sickroom tray and the chafing dish supper. The chafing dish was a fashionable late-Victorian and Edwardian device for informal entertaining, often said to have let a hostess cook at the table after the servants had gone for the evening, and it demanded dishes that were quick, forgiving and made from things already in the house. Cream toast qualified on every count, and the substitution of cream for milk was exactly the kind of small upgrade that turned nursery food into something presentable to guests. That the recipe consists of a single cross-referencing sentence says a good deal about the assumed competence of the reader, who was expected to know the milk toast formula by heart.