Home › Canning and Preserving › French Panada
French Panada
1/2 teaspoon butter Yolk of 1 egg 2 tablespoons milk Break the biscuit into a saucepan; pour over it boiling water sufficient to cover; boil five minutes; add butter and a little salt and mix well. Then stir in the egg yolk, well beaten in the milk; bring all to a boil and serve.
MILK TOAST No. 1 1 cup scalded milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 slices buttered toast Spread fresh toast with butter and sprinkle with salt. Pour the scalded milk over the toast and serve at once.
MILK TOAST No. 2 1 cup scalded milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 slices toast Cook the flour in the butter, but do not brown it; add the milk gradually; season and pour over the toast.
An invalid's panada — dry biscuit softened in water, enriched with butter and an egg yolk. It is quick, and its whole character depends on how you handle the yolk.
- The hinge: the yolkBeat the yolk into the two tablespoons of milk, then stir a spoonful of the hot biscuit mixture into it before returning everything to the pan. Poured in cold and boiled hard as written, the yolk sets in threads rather than thickening the panada.
- "Biscuit" hereThis means a hard, plain cracker in the British sense — water biscuit, pilot biscuit, or unsweetened soda cracker — not an American baking-powder biscuit. The quantity of biscuit is not given on this page.
- Boiling five minutesFive minutes suggests a much harder biscuit than we now buy. Modern soda crackers collapse in under a minute; boil them that long and you get paste. Cover, let them soften, and beat smooth.
- Scalded milkIn the milk toast that follows, scalding means heating to just below the boil, until the surface shivers and a skin begins to form — roughly 180F. It was often said to help keep milk from souring; today it simply gets the milk hot enough that the toast does not chill it.
- Milk Toast No. 2This is a plain white sauce: one tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of milk. Cook the roux a minute or two without colour, then add the milk gradually and whisk until it coats a spoon.
- Toast timingNo. 1 specifies fresh toast and says to serve at once; assemble both at the last moment. Toast made in advance goes soggy on contact and the dish becomes wet bread.
- YieldThe panada looks like a single portion. Each milk toast makes three slices with a cup of milk — one generous serving, or two modest ones.
Panada — from the Latin panis, bread — is one of the oldest sickroom foods in the European repertoire, a way of turning stale bread or hard biscuit into something a convalescent could swallow. English and American cookbooks carried it through the nineteenth century in the chapter usually headed "Food for the Sick," alongside beef tea, gruel, arrowroot and barley water. The "French" version is generally distinguished by the enrichment: butter and an egg yolk beaten into the softened bread, which lifts it a little above plain water panada. Milk toast belongs to exactly the same tradition and survived far longer in ordinary use, appearing on nursery tables and hotel breakfast menus well into the twentieth century.