Toast-and-Water
INGREDIENTS. -A slice of bread, 1 quart of boiling water.
Cut a slice from a stale loaf (a piece of hard crust is better than anything else for the purpose), toast it of a nice brown on every side, but do not allow it to burn or blacken. Put it into a jug, pour the boiling water over it, cover it closely, and let it remain until cold. When strained, it will be ready for use. Toast-and-water should always be made a short time before it is required, to enable it to get cold: if drunk in a tepid or lukewarm state, it is an exceedingly disagreeable beverage. If, as is sometimes the case, this drink is wanted in a hurry, put the toasted bread into a jug, and only just cover it with the boiling water; when this is cool, cold water may be added in the proportion required and the toast-and-water strained; it will then be ready for use, and is more expeditiously prepared than by the above method. above method.
Toast Sandwiches. INGREDIcold toast, thin slices of breadand-butter, pepper and salt to taste. Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat, to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.
A sickroom drink from the era before bottled mineral water, made by steeping toasted crust in boiling water. It is simple enough that only a few details govern whether the result is pleasant or dismal.
- Serve it properly coldThe recipe is emphatic and it is right: at blood heat this tastes like weak dishwater. Make it several hours ahead, or use the quick method of steeping in a small amount of boiling water and topping up with cold, then chill it thoroughly before serving.
- Use real crustA hard end crust from a stale white loaf gives the cleanest flavour. Modern soft sandwich bread disintegrates in the jug and clouds the liquid, so choose a lean, firm loaf with a proper baked crust.
- Toast, do not charThe colour of the toast is the colour of the drink. Aim for a deep even brown; any black edge turns the water bitter and no amount of straining will remove it.
- QuantitiesOne quart is roughly 1.1 litres, or four generous glasses. A single thick slice or a palm-sized piece of crust is enough for that volume.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve or a square of muslin. Bread solids left in suspension will settle into a sediment and spoil the appearance, which mattered a great deal in a sickroom.
- KeepingThere is no acid, sugar or alcohol here to preserve it. Refrigerate and drink within a day; the original only asks that it stand covered until cold, and leaving it at room temperature for longer than that is not a habit worth reviving.
Toast-and-water belonged to the Victorian invalid cookery repertoire, the group of thin gruels, beef teas, barley waters and possets that filled several pages of every nineteenth-century household manual. Its appeal was partly practical: the toast supplied a faint colour and roasted flavour to disguise the flatness of water that had been boiled, and it may well be that boiling made the water safer at a time when urban supplies frequently were not, though that reasoning is our inference rather than anything the recipes state. It was also cheap, which mattered in households nursing a long illness. The same logic underlies barley water and the toasted-grain coffee substitutes of the period, and it survives today in roasted-grain teas such as Japanese mugicha and Korean boricha, where toasted barley is steeped and drunk cold.