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Cream Toast
Substitute cream for milk, and omit butter in recipe for Milk Toast I or II.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the parent recipe: it is milk toast enriched, with cream doing the work of both the milk and the butter. A few notes on what the substitution actually changes.
- What "cream" meantPeriod cookbooks distinguished only thin and thick cream; the standardized modern grades did not exist. Something in the range of today's light cream gives the intended result; heavy cream makes the dish very rich and can be thinned with a little milk. Modern ultra-pasteurized cream will taste slightly cooked, which matters in a dish this plain.
- Why the butter goesMilk toast carries its fat as butter stirred into scalded milk or worked into a thin white sauce. Cream already supplies that fat, so adding butter as well leaves a greasy film on the surface. Leave it out as directed.
- Heat control is the hingeScald the cream to just below a simmer, with bubbles at the edge only. Cream boiled hard can thicken unevenly or separate, and there is nothing else in the dish to disguise it.
- If you follow the white-sauce versionFlour thickens noticeably faster in cream than in milk, since there is less water present. Judge by consistency rather than by measure: it should coat a spoon thinly, not mound on it.
- The toast itselfToast the bread dry and hard, well past pale gold, so it absorbs without collapsing. Day-old firm white bread holds up; soft modern sandwich bread turns to paste within a minute of being sauced.
- SeasoningSeasoning is minimal, so what there is carries the dish. Season the cream, not the toast, and taste it hot before pouring.
Milk toast was the standard convalescent and nursery food of nineteenth-century American households, bland by design and cheap enough to make from stale bread and whatever was in the milk pitcher; the cream version is simply the company-manners upgrade, which is why Fannie Farmer files it as a brief substitution rather than a recipe of its own. The Boston Cooking-School tradition treated dishes like this seriously because feeding the sick was considered part of a cook's training, and separate chapters on invalid cookery were common in domestic manuals of the period. The dish survived well into the twentieth century, and "milquetoast" entered the language as a word for a feeble character after H. T. Webster's comic-strip figure Caspar Milquetoast, introduced in 1924.