Home › Bread And Bread Making › Water Toast
Water Toast
Dip slices of dry toast quickly in boiling salted water, allowing one-half teaspoon salt to one cup boiling water. Spread slices with butter, and serve at once. 1 pint scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter Milk Toast I 2½ tablespoons bread flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons cold water 6 slices dry toast Add cold water gradually to flour to make a smooth, thin paste. Add to milk, stirring constantly until thickened, cover, and cook twenty minutes; then add salt and butter in small pieces. Dip slices of toast separately in sauce; when soft, remove to serving dish. Pour remaining sauce over all.
Two invalid-cookery standbys from Fannie Farmer: one barely a recipe, the other a thin white sauce poured over toast. Both depend entirely on the toast being properly dry.
- "Dry toast" is a technical term"Dry toast" is not just browned bread -- Farmer's toast directions call for stale bread cut in thin slices (about a third of an inch) and dried through rather than merely surface-coloured. Bread that is still soft inside will collapse the instant it meets liquid, which is the usual reason milk toast turns to mush.
- Dip quickly means quicklyFor water toast the slice goes in and out — a second or two. It should absorb salted water at the crust and stay intact; longer and there is nothing left to butter.
- Scalded milkHeat the pint to about 180F, until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim, not a rolling boil. Scalding was originally about keeping raw milk sweet; with pasteurised milk it simply gets the liquid hot before the starch goes in.
- Bread flour here is deliberateFarmer specifies bread flour for its higher gluten, but for a starch-thickened sauce all-purpose works identically. The 4 tablespoons cold water added gradually to 2½ tablespoons flour is a slurry — lump-free only if the water goes in a little at a time.
- The twenty-minute cookTwenty minutes over direct heat risks scorching the milk. The recipe names no vessel; set the pan over simmering water, or use a heavy pan on the lowest possible flame and stir often. The long cooking is to take the raw taste out of the flour.
- Butter goes in lastSalt and butter are added at the end, after the twenty minutes' cooking, cut in small pieces so they melt evenly into the sauce.
- YieldOne pint of sauce and six slices makes a light supper for two or three. Best taken to the table promptly, as the toast goes on softening in the sauce.
Milk toast and water toast belong to the broader nineteenth-century tradition of invalid or convalescent food, and the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries them as a matter of course among its bread and toast recipes: bland, warm, easy to swallow, and made from bread that was already going stale. Water toast is the barest version, for anyone who could not take milk, and it shows how much of period sickroom cookery was subtraction rather than addition. The milk version is simply a thin white sauce — flour, milk, butter, salt — and Farmer's insistence on exact level measurement, the thing that made her book famous, is visible even here in the fussy 2½ tablespoons of flour. Milk toast survived well into the twentieth century as American nursery and hangover food, generally recalled with more affection than it strictly earns.