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Snowflake Toast
1 pint milk 1/2 cup cream 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons flour 2 egg whites Toasted bread Heat the milk to scalding in a double boiler, and moisten the flour with the cream a little at a time. Rub until smooth; then stir into the hot milk. Cook about twenty minutes. Add the salt, and pour over the stiffly beaten egg whites, beating meanwhile. Moisten the toasted bread in a little hot milk or cream, and pour over the toast the above sauce.
A white sauce lightened with beaten egg whites and poured over milk-soaked toast — the meatless answer to creamed chipped beef. It comes together quickly once the sauce is made, but it will not wait.
- The hingePour the hot sauce over the whites off the heat, beating as you go, and serve within a minute or two. The foam holds only briefly; left standing, it weeps and the dish collapses into ordinary cream toast.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of milk. Four tablespoons of flour to 2 1/2 cups of liquid gives a fairly loose pouring sauce, which is what you want here — thicker and it will not coat the toast evenly.
- Making the pasteWhisk the flour into the cold cream to a smooth slurry before it goes near the hot milk. Adding it dry to scalded milk guarantees lumps that twenty minutes of cooking will not fix.
- The double boilerIt is there to stop the flour scorching during the long cook. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir often, but the water bath is genuinely more forgiving.
- Twenty minutesThis is not padding — it cooks out the raw starch taste that a two-minute roux-free sauce keeps. Stir every few minutes and add a splash of milk if it tightens too far.
- Egg whitesBeat to soft-to-firm peaks, not dry. The hot sauce warms the whites as it is beaten in, but does not reliably cook them; overbeaten whites tend to break up rather than smooth into foam.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for this volume is right, but the sauce is otherwise plain by design. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a little grated cheese are all period-appropriate additions.
- The toastDip the slices briefly in hot milk rather than soaking them — a few seconds a side. Sturdy white bread, cut thick and well toasted, survives it; sandwich bread turns to paste.
- YieldEnough sauce for four to six slices, so two to three servings as a supper dish.
Cream toast in its various forms was a fixture of American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward: cheap, filling, made from things every kitchen had, and gentle enough to be served to invalids and children. The "snowflake" here is the beaten egg white, which turns a flat white sauce into something light enough to look like a dish rather than a remedy. Cookbooks of this period are often said to have organised whole sections around using up the half of an egg the last recipe did not need, since custards, sauces and gilded pastry consumed yolks by the dozen. Meatless cookery of the early twentieth century leaned heavily on milk, eggs and cheese to supply what meat otherwise would, and creamed dishes over toast were the standard vehicle: the same architecture carried creamed mushrooms, creamed eggs, creamed asparagus and, in the non-vegetarian household, chipped beef.