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Water Toast
Toast two slices of bread a rich brown. Put into a soup-plate one teacup of boiling water and one teaspoon of salt. Dip the toast in this water and remove at once. Spread lightly with butter and serve immediately.
An invalid-cookery staple that survives only if the dipping is measured in seconds. Everything here depends on the bread being dry enough to survive the water.
- The hinge: in and out"Remove at once" is the whole recipe. A count of one on each side is enough; any longer and the slice collapses into wet pulp on the plate.
- TeacupA teacup in this period is smaller than the modern 8 oz measuring cup; it is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz. Around 3/4 cup of boiling water is a reasonable working figure.
- Salt levelA teaspoon of salt in 6 oz of water is a strongly saline bath, and the toast carries some of it off. Reduce to a scant half teaspoon if you dislike salty bread, or leave it out and salt the butter instead.
- Toast it hard"A rich brown" means dry all the way through, not pale and springy. Bread toasted only at the surface has a soft interior that turns to paste the moment it meets water. Day-old bread cut about 1/2 inch thick works best.
- Serve on a warm plateThe dish goes cold and slack within a minute or two. Warm the plate, butter immediately, and take it straight to the table.
- YieldTwo slices, one serving. It scales, but only if you toast and dip in batches small enough to serve at once.
Water toast belongs to the family of invalid and nursery dishes -- milk toast, cream toast, dry toast, beef-tea toast -- that appear widely in American household manuals from the later nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Before commercial baby foods and canned soups, a cook was expected to produce something bland, warm and swallowable for the sick, the very young and the toothless, and stale bread was always to hand. The boiling water here does two things: it softens the crumb without the richness of milk or cream, which convalescent diets often restricted, and it warms the slice through so the butter melts in.