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Boston-Brown-Bread Toast
T Dry slightly in the oven the needed number of slices of brown bread and toast them carefully over a slow fire. Lay them on a warm platter, butter, and pour over them white sauce No. 1 (see page 67), to which one or two spoonfuls of finely chopped cooked ham have been added. Serve very hot.
A creamed-toast supper built on leftover steamed brown bread, from a book whose whole business is the second life of food. The method is simple; the details that need translating are the bread itself and the sauce it points to.
- Boston brown breadA steamed, not baked, loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat flour with molasses, leavened with baking soda and traditionally cooked in a cylindrical tin or coffee can. Canned versions still exist; a bakery pumpernickel is denser and sweeter-crumbed but will stand in. It is moist enough that it will not toast well straight from the loaf, which is why the recipe dries it first.
- Drying in the ovenThe book gives no temperature. In a modern oven a low setting, in the region of 250-300F for ten to fifteen minutes, turning once, will drive off surface moisture without colouring the slices. Skip this and the bread steams rather than crisps.
- "Toast over a slow fire"This means gentle, patient browning at a distance from the coals, not a hard sear. A low broiler rack or a dry skillet over medium-low heat gives the same result. Molasses browns fast, so brown bread scorches sooner than white.
- White sauce No. 1The book's cross-reference on page 67 is not reproduced here, but a thin white sauce of the period runs roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, with 1 cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper. Make it thin enough to pour, since it must soak slightly into the toast.
- The ham'One or two spoonfuls' stirred into the sauce is a garnish, not a filling. Any cooked ham works; the salt it carries means the sauce should be under-seasoned until the ham goes in.
- Slice thicknessCut about half an inch. Thinner slices dry to a cracker and the sauce turns them to paste; thicker ones stay damp at the centre.
- Yield and timingTwo slices per person as a supper or breakfast dish, one alongside eggs. The sauce should be finished last and poured the moment the toast is buttered, as this dish goes soft within a few minutes.
Boston brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of steamed, molasses-sweetened loaves made with rye and cornmeal in place of scarce wheat, eaten most often on Saturday nights with baked beans. It is a bread that keeps and stales into firmness rather than crumb, which is exactly why a book on left-overs finds a use for it. Creamed toast in its various forms was standard American breakfast and supper fare well into the twentieth century, and the pattern here is the classic one: stale bread revived by heat, a thin white sauce for moisture, and a spoonful of chopped meat to make it a meal. The frugality is unremarkable for the period; using brown bread rather than white simply carries a molasses sweetness against the salt of the ham.