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Cracker Toast
Split and toast common crackers. Spread generously with butter, moisten with salted boiling water, put in hot dish, and pour over scalded milk. (This acts as an astringent in cases of dysentery.) (Is also healing to the intestines.)
A sickroom pap: dry crackers softened with hot liquid until they collapse into something between soup and porridge. It works, but only if you use the right cracker and stop short of turning it to paste.
- "Common crackers"These are the thick, dry, puffed soda crackers still sold in New England as Vermont common crackers, not thin salted saltines. They split cleanly along the middle seam and are sturdy enough to absorb liquid without disintegrating. Saltines will dissolve almost immediately; if that is all you have, use fewer and add the milk at the table.
- ToastingToast the split halves cut side up until pale gold, in a toaster oven or under a broiler for two or three minutes. The point is a light dry crust that holds its shape for a moment against the hot milk, and a faint toasted flavor that is most of what this dish has.
- "Moisten with salted boiling water"A tablespoon or two per cracker, sprinkled on, not a soak. Its job is to melt the butter into the crumb and season it; the milk does the rest of the softening.
- Scalded milkHeat milk to about 180F, when it steams and shows a ring of small bubbles at the edge, then pour it over. Scalding is usually explained as a way of dealing with unpasteurized milk and of delaying souring; with modern milk it simply means hot milk, and it should not be boiled hard or it will skin and taste cooked.
- QuantityThree or four split crackers and roughly a cup of milk make one invalid's serving. Use a warmed bowl, as the original directs a hot dish, because the whole thing goes tepid within a minute or two.
- The medical claimToast, crackers and hot milk are not astringents and do nothing to heal the intestine. Dysentery is a serious bacterial or amoebic infection whose real danger is dehydration; it needs medical care and oral rehydration, not a milk sop. Dairy is also poorly tolerated during many acute gut illnesses.
- What it is actually good forA bland, warm, easily swallowed food for someone recovering appetite after illness or dental work. Treat it as comfort rather than treatment.
Sickroom cookery had its own chapter in a great many American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, back when convalescence happened at home and the invalid's tray was the housewife's responsibility. Cracker toast belongs to a family of milk sops — milk toast, cracker gruel, panada, water toast — built on the era's conviction that bland, soft, white food spared an inflamed digestive tract, a belief generally traced to the low, unstimulating diets prescribed by nineteenth-century physicians for fevers and "bowel complaints." The "common cracker" the recipe assumes was a hard, long-keeping baked good, often said to descend from ship's biscuit, sold from barrels in country stores and kept on hand precisely because it lasted; splitting and reviving it in hot liquid was its ordinary use. The parenthetical claims about astringency and healing show a household cookbook doing double duty as a domestic medical manual.