Creamed Toast
1 pint of milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 6 to 8 slices of bread Make a thin, white sauce of the milk, butter, flour and salt. Toast the bread, preferably until crisp. Pour over this the white sauce. Serve at once.
A thin white sauce over crisp toast, and the whole thing turns on the sauce being thin enough to soak in without turning the bread to paste.
- The measurementsA pint is two cups of milk. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour against two cups of milk gives a deliberately thin sauce — roughly half the thickening of a standard medium bechamel.
- SaltA full teaspoon in two cups of sauce reads high to modern palates, especially if the butter is salted. Start with half and adjust once the sauce has thickened.
- Cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two before the milk goes in, or the sauce carries a raw, pasty taste that nothing later will hide.
- Add milk graduallyMilk whisked in a little at a time gives a smooth sauce; adding it all at once without whisking is the usual cause of lumps. Simmer gently until it just coats a spoon.
- Why crisp toastSoft or pale toast dissolves into the sauce within seconds. Toast dry and well browned through, and it holds its structure long enough to eat.
- Serve at onceThis is not a dish that waits. The sauce skins over and the toast goes limp, so assemble at the table or plate directly from the pan.
- YieldSix to eight slices, so three to four servings as a supper dish, two as a full meal. Nutmeg, black pepper, or chopped hard-cooked egg are all natural additions to a dish of this kind.
Creamed toast belongs to the family of milk toasts — bread moistened with hot milk, cream, or a flour-thickened sauce — that served as invalid food, nursery food, and cheap supper across nineteenth-century British and American households. A dish of milk, butter, flour and stale bread was built from pantry staples most likely to be on hand, and could carry a meal on a fast day or a meatless day without asking anything of the butcher. The technique — a thin white sauce poured over toast — is an old one, long predating any of the twentieth-century campaigns that gave such recipes fresh currency.