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Cream Toast
Stir a piece of butter the size of an egg into one pint of boiling milk; stir one tablespoon of flour into one cup of rich cream and add some of the boiling milk to this; heat gradually, to prevent the flour from lumping, then stir it into the boiling milk and cook a few minutes; add salt to taste; take from the fire, stir in one beaten egg and strain the mixture over lightly buttered toast.
A rich milk sauce thickened with both flour and egg, poured over toast. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and the only real difficulties are lumps and soggy bread.
- Butter the size of an eggConventionally reckoned at about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books commonly measured butter by eye against familiar objects — a walnut, an egg — though the equivalences varied from book to book.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. "Rich cream" means heavy or whipping cream; the modern equivalent of the whole mixture is about 2 cups milk to 1 cup heavy cream, which makes a very rich sauce indeed. Half-and-half in place of the cream gives a lighter result closer to plain milk toast.
- The hinge: temper the flourThe flour goes into cold cream first, then hot milk is added to the cream a little at a time before the whole is returned to the pan. Reversing that order, or adding the slurry all at once to boiling milk, is what produces lumps. The recipe's "heat gradually" is doing real work.
- One tablespoon of flour is not muchFor three cups of liquid this gives a pourable sauce, not a gravy. The beaten egg adds body as well. If you want it thicker, increase the flour rather than cooking it longer — the sauce will not tighten much past a few minutes.
- The egg goes in off the heatStir the beaten egg into the sauce after the pan leaves the burner and keep stirring. The residual heat sets it; direct heat scrambles it. Straining, which the recipe calls for, catches any threads that form.
- Toast and timingUse a firm white bread cut thick, toasted dry and dark enough to hold up. Butter it lightly, plate it, and pour immediately — the sauce softens toast within a minute or two, which is the point, but bread that sits in it turns to paste.
- YieldAbout three cups of sauce, enough for four to six slices. Serve in shallow bowls, with pepper or a scrape of nutmeg if you like.
Cream toast and its plainer cousin milk toast were common invalid and nursery dishes in American households through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — soft, bland, warm, and made entirely from things a kitchen already had. Milk toast was a standard sick-room and convalescent food of the period. This version is the upgraded one: where milk toast is simply hot buttered milk over toast, the cream, flour and egg here push it toward a cream sauce, closer to what a later cook would recognize as the base for creamed chipped beef or creamed eggs on toast. The habit of measuring butter as "the size of an egg" belongs to the same era.