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Milk Toast
3 tablespoons flour teaspoon salt toasted bread Toast bread according to recipe for Dry Toast. Mix flour and cold milk; add to scalded milk and cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring constantly at first; add salt and butter; dip toast in sauce; serve in hot dish; add remaining sauce.
A thickened white sauce poured over toast, cooked in the water-jacketed pan of a chafing dish. The proportions that survive give the thickener but not the liquid; a standard white sauce ratio is three tablespoons flour to a pint of milk, with about a tablespoon of butter.
- The double boiler is the pointThe upper pan never touches direct heat, so the flour cannot scorch and the milk cannot catch. On a stove, a bowl over barely simmering water does the same work.
- Mix flour with cold milk firstFlour stirred into hot milk will lump instantly. Slake it smooth in a few tablespoons of cold milk, then pour that into the scalded milk in a thin stream while stirring.
- Scalded milkHeated until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim, around 180F, not boiled. In the period this also served to check souring in unpasteurised milk; today it simply speeds the thickening.
- Twenty minutes is not a misprintLong, gentle cooking over water is what removes the raw-flour taste when no roux is made. Stir constantly only until it thickens, then occasionally; a skin will form if it sits untouched.
- Dry ToastThe book's separate recipe is not reproduced here; in period usage "dry toast" generally means bread toasted through rather than merely coloured on the surface. Dry, firm toast holds its structure under the sauce; fresh soft bread collapses.
- SeasoningThe salt quantity has not come through legibly. Half a teaspoon to a pint of milk is the usual starting point for this style of sauce; taste before it goes over the toast.
- YieldNo yield is given. If the sauce is made up to about a pint it would dress roughly four to six slices.
Milk toast belongs to the long tradition of soft, bland "sick-room cookery" that ran through nineteenth-century American household manuals, food thought suitable for invalids, small children and the elderly, and eaten by everyone else at breakfast or as a late supper. The chafing dish had a vogue in genteel American households around the turn of the twentieth century as equipment for cooking at the table, and a white sauce over toast was the sort of thing an amateur could manage over a spirit lamp without ruining it. Lowney's book, published by a chocolate manufacturer, is one of many company cookbooks of the era that mixed promotion of the firm's product with a full run of ordinary household recipes such as this one.