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Cream Toasts
Cut some slices of bread, about one-third of an inch in thickness, and trim off the crusts. Have ready on the fire a bowl half full of boiling water with about one ounce of butter in it; toast the slices of bread a pale brown, and as each slice is done dip it in the boiling water and butter for a second, sprinkle on a little salt and lay it in a deep, hot dish (the one in which it is to be served). Pour one quart of milk into a saucepan and set it on the fire, thicken with one ounce of cornmeal, stir in two ounces of butter, let it simmer until all the toasts are ready and stir into it the whites of three or four eggs (which should have been beaten to a stiff froth before the bread was cut). Allow this to come just to the boil and pour it over the toast, lifting the slices one by one to let the mixture run in between them. Cover the dish well and put it in the oven for two or three minutes, just prior to serving.
A milk sauce thickened with cornmeal, poured over buttered toast — a hotel breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on how you handle the cornmeal and the egg whites.
- The hinge: cornmeal needs timeOne ounce of cornmeal (about 3 tablespoons) into a quart of milk gives a thin, pourable sauce, but raw cornmeal tastes gritty and chalky unless it cooks through. Sprinkle it in while whisking to avoid lumps and let it simmer a good 10-15 minutes, not the vague "until all the toasts are ready." Fine-ground yellow or white cornmeal works; coarse polenta grind will stay sandy.
- Add the whites off the boilThe instruction to stir in beaten whites and "allow this to come just to the boil" will curdle them into threads if taken literally. Pull the pan from the heat, fold the froth in, and return it only briefly to set — the whites are there to lighten the sauce, not to scramble.
- The butter-water dipAn ounce of butter in a bowl of boiling water is an emulsion-free way to butter toast fast and evenly, the sort of trick that makes sense on a hotel line. A second is a second: any longer and the toast is a sponge. Brushing with melted butter gives the same result with less risk.
- Weights to volumesOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; two ounces is a quarter cup. One ounce of cornmeal is roughly 3 tablespoons. A quart of milk is 4 cups — whole milk, since skim gives a thin, bluish sauce.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven term to infer one from; the dish only needs to be held and glazed. Two or three minutes covered in an already-hot oven is a warming step, not a bake.
- Salt and seasoningThe salt goes on the toast, and the sauce itself is seasoned with nothing at all. Salt the milk as it heats and add a grating of nutmeg or white pepper; unseasoned milk sauce over salted toast reads as bland in the middle.
- Yield and timingThe recipe states no yield. A quart of sauce will dress roughly eight slices of bread, enough for about four at breakfast. It should go to the table at once; toast under sauce softens to paste quickly.
Cream toast, milk toast and their relatives were fixtures of American hotel and household cookery through the nineteenth century — cheap, soft, and served equally to children, invalids and men at breakfast. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, gave his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), and the hotel's fingerprints are all over this recipe: bread cut to a stated thickness, crusts trimmed, the bowl of buttered water kept boiling on the fire so a stack of slices can be dressed in seconds. What separates it from the plain milk toast of home cookbooks is the thickener and the beaten whites, which give the sauce body and a foamed lightness.