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Milk Toast II
Use ingredients given in Milk Toast I, omitting cold water, and make as Thin White Sauce. Dip toast in sauce.
A two-line variation that assumes you have the preceding recipe and the white sauce table in front of you. The change is method, not flavor: instead of thickening scalded milk with flour slaked in cold water, you cook the flour in butter first, which is why the water is dropped.
- What "Thin White Sauce" means hereIn this book's proportions a thin white sauce is about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, with salt. Melt the butter, stir in the flour and let it bubble without coloring, then add the milk gradually and cook until it just coats a spoon.
- Why the cold water goesMilk Toast I uses a flour-and-water slurry stirred into hot milk. A roux does the same job with no raw-starch taste and less risk of lumps, so the water has no function once butter is doing the dispersing.
- The hinge: dip, do not soakThe instruction is "dip," not pour over and let stand: pass each slice through the hot sauce briefly, lay it on a warm plate, and spoon a little more sauce over. Left in the sauce, the crumb will soften toward mush.
- Toast it dryNothing here specifies the bread, but toast browned only on the faces will give way faster than toast dried through; slightly stale bread, cut on the thicker side, holds its structure against hot liquid better than fresh sandwich bread.
- Season the sauce, not the toastA thin sauce of milk and flour is bland by design and needs more salt than you expect. Taste it before dipping; the book's white sauce also takes pepper.
- Serve at onceThis does not hold, reheat, or travel. Have the plates warm and the sauce at a bare simmer when the last slice comes out of the toaster.
- YieldThe quantity follows Milk Toast I, which this recipe borrows its ingredients from; scale the sauce to the number of slices rather than the reverse.
Milk toast belongs to the long family of invalid and nursery dishes in which bread is softened in hot liquid, as in panada, and it sits in the bread chapter among the toasts. Period cookbooks commonly list it alongside cream toast, water toast and dry toast. It was standard fare for the sickroom, the very young and the toothless, as well as an ordinary cheap supper. Giving a dish twice -- once with a water-slaked flour thickening and once by way of the white sauce proportions -- is characteristic of the book's teaching method: the sauce proportions are set out once and later dishes refer back rather than repeating them.