Home › Canning and Preserving › Cream Toast
Cream Toast
1 slice bread 1 cup cream Salt Cut the bread half an inch thick and toast it brown on both sides. Lay it on a hot plate; sprinkle with salt; pour over it the cream, heated but not boiled, and serve at once.
A single-serving invalid dish that lives or dies on the bread. Everything else is a matter of temperature.
- The hinge: heat the cream, don't boil itCream brought to a boil throws a skin. Warm it to about 180F, just until it steams and trembles at the edge of the pan.
- Cream, then and nowHousehold cream of the period was probably closer to what we sell as light or table cream, and was certainly not ultra-pasteurized; the richness of hand-skimmed cream varied a good deal. Heavy cream is likely to make this cloying; half-and-half or light cream is nearer the mark.
- A full cup is a lotOne cup of cream over one slice of bread reads as generous even for a sickroom portion. Half a cup soaks a half-inch slice thoroughly; the rest is soup unless you want it that way.
- Bread thickness mattersHalf an inch of a firm, close-crumbed white loaf will absorb the cream and hold together. Modern sandwich bread collapses into paste; use a good pain de mie, country white, or a day-old slice.
- Toast dark, not pale"Brown on both sides" is doing real work here. The toasted surface is the only flavor in the dish besides salt and dairy, so take it to a deep brown for the bitter edge that keeps the cream from tasting flat.
- Heat the plateThe instruction is not decorative. A cold plate drops the cream below serving temperature within seconds and the fat begins to feel waxy. Warm the plate in the oven or under hot water and dry it.
- YieldOne serving, eaten immediately. It does not hold, reheat, or travel.
Cream toast belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century milk-and-bread dishes -- milk toast, water toast, panada, graveyard stew -- that were fed to invalids, small children, and the elderly at a time when soft, bland, easily digested food was the standard prescription for a delicate stomach. Cookbooks of the period routinely carried a chapter on "cookery for the sick," and toast softened in hot liquid appears in nearly all of them, cream being the luxurious version and hot water the frugal one.