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Brown Bread Milk Toast
Make same as Milk Toast, using slices of toasted brown bread in place of white bread. Brown bread is better toasted by first drying slices in oven.
A two-line cross-reference that assumes you have already turned back to Milk Toast. The essentials of that parent recipe, and the peculiarities of brown bread, are worth spelling out.
- What Milk Toast isIn this book it is toast moistened with hot milk and dressed with a thin white sauce. The parent recipe is not reproduced here; a thin white sauce of the period runs to roughly 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt to a cup of scalded milk. Cook the flour in the butter briefly before adding milk so the sauce does not taste raw.
- The brown bread meant hereMost likely Boston brown bread, steamed rather than baked, made with rye meal and cornmeal and sweetened with molasses, though 'brown bread' could also mean a baked graham or whole-wheat loaf. If it is the steamed kind it is dense, damp and slightly sweet, and a supermarket wholemeal or a wheat sandwich loaf gives a quite different dish.
- Why it is dried firstSteamed brown bread carries more moisture than a white loaf, so it tends to stew rather than brown under direct heat. The recipe gives neither temperature nor time; a low oven until the slices are firm is enough, then toast them.
- Slice thicknessCut about 1/2 inch thick. Brown bread crumbles when cut thin, and a canned or cylindrical loaf slices most cleanly when a day old.
- Sauce consistencyBecause the bread is sweet and porous it absorbs sauce quickly. Keep the sauce on the thin side and pour it over at the table, or the toast collapses before it reaches the plate.
- Yield and servingA cup of sauce will dress two or three slices, enough for one or two people at breakfast or as a supper dish. Serve immediately in a shallow bowl, with a spoon.
Milk toast belonged to the category of invalid and nursery cookery that occupies a good deal of space in late nineteenth-century American manuals: soft, bland, warm, and cheap enough to make from stale bread. The brown bread version borrows from the New England habit of keeping a steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and molasses on hand, the traditional partner to Saturday baked beans. Manuals of this kind work by exactly this kind of cross-reference, teaching a base method once and then listing variations in a line or two, and it is a reasonable index of how thoroughly a reader was expected to have absorbed the white sauce that runs through the whole volume.