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Milk Toast
Milk toast quite frequently hits the spot for a lot of reasons, especially when you're living out of doors. Evaporated and powdered milk taste as well as fresh when they are heated to near the boiling point and poured over toast, especially if the milk is well salted. Float some butter on the milk, besides buttering the toast, and the illusion of fresh milk is complete.
A camp breakfast rather than a formal recipe: hot salted milk poured over buttered toast. The whole thing turns on the milk being hot enough and seasoned enough to taste like something.
- Evaporated milk is concentratedCanned evaporated milk is roughly half water by volume compared with fresh. Dilute it about one to one with water before heating, or the result is cloying rather than comforting. Sweetened condensed milk is a different product entirely and will not work here.
- Powdered milk ratioModern instant nonfat dry milk reconstitutes at about 1/3 cup powder to 1 cup water. Mixing it an hour ahead and letting it stand improves the flavour considerably, as the powder hydrates fully and loses some of its raw chalkiness.
- Near boiling, not boilingMilk scorches on the bottom of a pan long before it visibly simmers, and once scorched the whole pot tastes of it. Heat gently, stir, and pull it off when steam rises and the surface shivers, around 180F.
- The salt is the pointUnsalted hot milk over toast tastes flat. The recipe gives no amount; a generous pinch per cup is a reasonable reading of "well salted," and the salt is what makes reconstituted milk read as fresh.
- Toast it hardSoft toast collapses into paste on contact. Take it darker and drier than you would for butter alone so it holds structure long enough to eat, which matters more with camp bread than with a soft commercial loaf.
- Butter floated on topThe film of melted butter on the surface adds richness and slows the milk cooling in an open bowl outdoors. It is doing real work, not just decoration.
- QuantityFigure roughly a cup of hot milk to two slices of toast per person. Serve in a bowl with a spoon; this is eaten wet, not picked up.
Milk toast belongs to a family of invalid and nursery foods that ran through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery: soft, warm, easily swallowed, and made from things any household had. It appears in outdoor cooking books for a different reason, which is that canned evaporated milk and dry milk powder travelled where fresh milk could not. Evaporated milk was widely available in tins from the late nineteenth century onward and became a fixture of camp and military provisioning; dried milk followed. The frank admission here that the dish creates an "illusion of fresh milk" is characteristic of much camp writing, which was often candid about substitution.