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Dip Toast
1½ tbsp. flour 1 cup scalded milk 2 tbsp. cold milk 2 slices dry toast 3/4 tbsp. butter 1/4 tsp. salt.
Add cold milk gradually to flour to make a smooth paste. Turn into scalded milk, stirring constantly at first until mixture thickens. Cook over hot water 20 minutes. Add salt, and butter in small pieces. Dip slices of toast separately in sauce. When soft, remove to serving dish, and pour over the remaining sauce. This is very easy to digest, but one must be sure the starch in the flour is thoroughly cooked. Butter must melt and not cook.
A thin white sauce poured over dried bread — invalid cookery at its plainest. The whole point is that the flour be cooked out completely, so resist the urge to shorten the twenty minutes.
- Cook over hot waterThis means a double boiler, or a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water. Direct heat for twenty minutes would scorch a sauce this thin and leave a skin on the bottom.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk until it steams and small bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, not to a rolling boil. With modern pasteurised milk this is no longer necessary for safety, but a warm liquid blends into the flour paste without lumping.
- Why the full 20 minutesThe note about thoroughly cooked starch is the hinge of the recipe. Flour thickens in about two minutes but keeps a raw, pasty taste well past that; sustained gentle cooking swells and breaks down the granules, which is what makes the sauce bland and easy on a queasy stomach.
- Butter must melt and not cookTake the pan off the heat before stirring in the butter in small pieces. Butter held over heat separates and browns, which changes the flavour and defeats the deliberate blandness.
- Proportions1 1/2 tbsp flour to 1 cup milk gives a thin sauce, thinner than a modern bechamel, which uses roughly twice the flour and butter to the same milk. It is meant to soak into the toast, not coat it.
- Dry toastToast the bread slowly until it is dry through rather than just browned on the surface, as for melba toast. Ordinary soft-centred toast collapses into mush the moment it meets the sauce.
- YieldProbably one serving; the recipe does not say. Salt to taste at the end; a quarter teaspoon in a cup of sauce is modest.
Dip toast belongs to the once-large genre of sick-room or invalid cookery, which many general household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried. Before hospitals took over most convalescent care, feeding the ill fell to the family kitchen, and the guiding theory held that bland, starchy, thoroughly cooked food made the least demand on a weakened digestion — hence gruels, beef teas, milk toasts and arrowroot puddings. The insistence that the starch be "thoroughly cooked" reflects the period's genuine, if imperfectly understood, interest in digestibility, a subject taken up seriously by the domestic science movement and by writers such as Fannie Farmer, whose Boston Cooking-School book carried similar milk-toast formulas. Church-society compilations, including those produced by Bible-class women to raise funds, often reserved a few pages for these recipes because caring for the sick was understood as part of the same work.