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Toast Water
Toast two or three slices of stale bread until brown all through, but not at all scorched. Break the toast in small pieces, and put one cup of it into a pitcher, using none of the toast that is not thoroughly brown. Pour on the toast three cups of boiling water, let this stand for ten minutes, strain, and serve when cold.
KOUMISS-Heat one quart of milk to seventy-five degrees, add one and one-half tablespoons of sugar and one-fourth of a yeast cake, dissolved in lukewarm water. Fill sterilized beer bottles to within one and one-half inches of the top, cork tightly and shake. Invert the bottles and place where they will be in a temperature of about seventy degrees for ten hours. Place on ice and let stand for two days, shaking now and then to prevent the cream from forming in the mouth of the bottle.
Two entries have run together here: toast water, a genuinely simple invalid drink, and koumiss, a home-fermented milk that should not be attempted from these directions. The notes below cover both, and why the second one fails.
- The hinge for toast waterThe bread must be dried and browned all the way through, not toasted dark on the surface and soft inside. Pale bits contribute nothing but starch, and scorched bits turn the water bitter — hence the instruction to discard anything not thoroughly brown.
- Proportions and yieldOne cup of broken toast to three cups of boiling water gives roughly two to three invalid-sized servings. It should come out the colour of weak tea and taste faintly of grain; if it tastes of nothing, the bread was not browned enough.
- Stale bread is specified for a reasonBread of this kind was generally a lean dough that dried hard rather than going stale-soft. Modern enriched sandwich bread contains fat, sugar and dough conditioners that turn muddy in hot water; a lean bakery loaf, well dried, behaves closest to what the book intends.
- Serve cold, strain twiceA single pass through a sieve leaves sediment that settles unpleasantly. A fine strainer or muslin, then chilling, is what makes this drinkable rather than merely warm and cloudy.
- Why the koumiss cannot be madeMilk is held at about 70-75°F for ten hours with a piece of baker's yeast and sugar. Baker's yeast produces alcohol and carbon dioxide but almost no acid, so nothing lowers the pH into a range that suppresses pathogens. Ten hours at room temperature is well within the range in which Salmonella, Listeria and pathogenic E. coli can multiply, and the finished drink is never heated.
- The bottles are a second hazardLive yeast, added sugar and tightly corked glass held warm is a pressure vessel. Beer bottles of the period were heavy glass, and corks were often wired or otherwise secured; corking a modern bottle tightly and leaving it fermenting invites it to burst.
- Real koumiss is a different processTraditional koumiss relies on an established mixed culture of lactic acid bacteria and yeast that acidifies the milk as it ferments. This recipe borrows the name and the fizz without the acid, which is precisely the part that made the original keep. If you want cultured or fermented dairy, use a current recipe with a defined starter.
Toast water belongs to the nineteenth-century sickroom, where the standing assumption was that an invalid could take almost nothing and that liquids should be bland, faintly nourishing and above all safe to swallow. It also had a practical virtue nobody stated outright: the water was boiled. In an era of uncertain municipal supply, a drink made with boiling water and served cold was safer than water from the tap, and toast water, barley water and rice water all owe some of their reputation to that fact. Koumiss sits oddly beside it. The genuine article is a fermented mare's milk drink of the Central Asian steppe, and in the 1880s and 1890s it acquired a considerable Western medical vogue as a treatment for tuberculosis, dyspepsia and general wasting — "koumiss cures" were advertised on both sides of the Atlantic. Cookbooks of the period duly printed cow's-milk imitations made with baker's yeast, which reproduced the effervescence and the faint alcohol while missing the souring culture that made the original drink stable.