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Toast Water
Dry and brown in the oven very thin slices of white or graham bread, break into small pieces, cover with boiling water; when cold, strain and season with salt. 1 cup sugar
A sickroom drink rather than a chafing-dish dish, and one of the simplest things in the book: browned bread infused in boiling water, strained, and salted. A few notes on reading it.
- The stray "1 cup sugar"This line appears to be a fragment left over from a neighbouring recipe rather than part of the toast water; a cup of sugar would defeat the point of a salted invalid drink entirely.
- Oven for drying the breadThe recipe gives no temperature, only "in the oven"; a low oven is implied by the instruction to dry as well as brown. The slices should go dry and evenly brown through, not scorched — burnt spots turn the water bitter and acrid rather than nutty.
- Slice thickness"Very thin" is not defined in the original. Thick slices stay soft in the middle and cloud the water with crumb instead of colouring it.
- ProportionsNone are given. Roughly a couple of slices to a pint of boiling water gives a pale, faintly toasty liquid; more bread makes it heavier.
- Steeping"When cold" is the whole timing — perhaps an hour, covered. The recipe gives no other guide.
- StrainingUse a fine sieve, lined with muslin or a coffee filter if you want it clearer; bread sediment is what makes it unpleasant.
- Graham breadWhole-wheat bread made from coarsely ground unsifted flour, named for Sylvester Graham. Any whole-wheat loaf stands in; it gives a darker, maltier result than white.
- KeepingIt is a fresh drink. Make what will be used in a day and refrigerate it — a starchy infusion left at room temperature sours quickly.
Toast water was standard sickroom equipment through the nineteenth century, listed in cookbooks and nursing manuals alongside barley water, beef tea and gruel. Part of its appeal was the period's conviction that an invalid's stomach could not manage anything with substance in it. Lowney's, published by a chocolate company, carries it as part of the general household repertoire an American cookery book of around 1900 was expected to include. The stray sugar line is the sort of small wreckage that survives in reprinted texts and is worth leaving visible.