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Toast Water
Toast either stale white or graham bread and cover with boiling water. Let stand until cold and serve with cream and sugar. A small piece of lemon peel may be added.
A sickroom drink rather than a beverage anyone would choose today, but it is easy to make well or badly. The whole character comes from how far you take the toast.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Roughly one thick slice of bread to a pint (2 cups) of boiling water is a ratio often given in nineteenth-century recipes, and yields a single glass or two small ones. Less bread gives you faintly flavoured water; more gives you a gruel.
- Toast it darkThis is the hinge. The flavour comes almost entirely from the browning of the bread, so it should be toasted until it is a deep even brown, dry all the way through, with no pale spots. Pale toast gives a drink that tastes of wet bread. Do not let it blacken, which turns the water bitter.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf made from unsifted flour, named for Sylvester Graham. Any plain whole-wheat bread stands in. Stale bread is specified because it dries and browns more readily than fresh.
- Strain before servingThe recipe does not say so, but the sodden toast is meant to be left behind. Pour the cooled liquid through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth.
- Cooling"Let stand until cold" would have meant standing somewhere cool. A soaked-bread infusion at room temperature is a good medium for bacteria, so cover it and put it in the refrigerator once the initial heat is off, and drink it the same day.
- Cream and sugarAdd these at the glass, not to the pitcher, and go lightly: a tablespoon of cream and a teaspoon of sugar to a tumbler. Cream stirred in early will separate as the liquid sits.
- Lemon peelUse a pared strip of zest with no white pith, added while the water is still hot so the oils are drawn out, and lift it out before it turns the drink resinous.
Toast water belongs to the long tradition of invalid cookery, the branch of the domestic manual devoted to feeding the sick, and it appears in English and American household books from the eighteenth century onward. The logic behind it was that a fever patient needed fluid and a little nourishment in the mildest possible form, and that plain water was considered too bland or too "raw" for a weak stomach; toasting supplied flavour and, it was believed, made the starch easier to digest. Water-cure enthusiasm and the pledge against liquor did tend to travel together, and chapters of non-alcoholic sickroom drinks are often found in company with the older practice of dosing invalids with wine whey, brandy and mulled ale. Recipes of this kind faded once intravenous fluids, commercial fruit juices and modern understandings of rehydration made them unnecessary, leaving toast water as a small record of what nursing at home actually involved.