Cinnamon Toast
Toast thin slices of bread to a delicate brown; butter evenly and sprinkle with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Serve with afternoon tea.
A three-line recipe with almost nothing to convert, but a few details in it are period-specific and worth knowing.
- Powdered sugarIn an early 20th-century American book this usually means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Either works; superfine dissolves into the butter and stays glossy, while confectioners' sugar dries to a matte film.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable ratio is 4 parts sugar to 1 part ground cinnamon, mixed in advance so the cinnamon is evenly distributed rather than sprinkled in patches.
- Thin slicesBread of the period was cut by hand from a home-baked or bakery loaf, so "thin" was the cook's judgement rather than a measurement. Standard sandwich bread is already close; a thicker artisan slice will want a longer, gentler toasting so the crumb dries rather than steams.
- The hingeButter and sugar go on while the toast is hot, in that order. The butter melts into the surface and the sugar sets on it; sugared cold toast just sheds its topping.
- Toasting"A delicate brown" is pale gold, not dark. Cinnamon toast is often finished under a broiler for a minute after sugaring, which caramelizes the surface, but this recipe does not ask for that.
- ServingServe at once. It does not hold; the sugar draws moisture and the toast softens within a few minutes.
Cinnamon toast belongs to the long tradition of sweetened toasts that runs back through English cookery, where toast sopped in wine, spiced, or spread with sugar served as invalid food and nursery food alike. The instruction to "serve with afternoon tea" places it on the tea tray, alongside small cakes and thin sandwiches, at a time when afternoon tea was an established fixture of middle-class American entertaining. Cinnamon itself had long since stopped being a luxury by 1900 — cheap cassia bark, ground and sold ready-milled, was a pantry staple — which is why a spice that once signaled wealth could underwrite the plainest possible tea-table dish.