Home › Left-Over Bread › Make
Make
Toast bread to a golden brown, having it dry all through. Keep hot in deep dish in oven. white sauce No. I (see page 67), using one and a half cups for six slices of toast. Pour between and over slices of toast and serve hot. If a softer toast is liked, quickly dip slices in hot water or milk before adding sauce.
This is milk toast, or cream toast — dry-toasted bread napped with a thin white sauce. The text is telling; a missing verb after "golden brown" means the direction to make the sauce has dropped out, but the intent is clear.
- The hinge: dry the bread throughToast made only on the surface turns to mush the moment sauce hits it. Toast slowly, or dry the slices in a low oven first and then brown them, so the interior is crisp enough to absorb liquid without collapsing.
- White sauce No. IPage 67 is missing, so the exact formula is unknown; if it is the thin white sauce usual in books of this period, that is about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, with salt and often a little white pepper. On that basis, for the 1 1/2 cups called for here use 1 1/2 tablespoons butter, 1 1/2 tablespoons flour, 1 1/2 cups milk. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Keeping hot in the oven"Keep hot" means holding at low heat, not baking: the lowest oven setting, with the dish uncovered. Covering traps steam and undoes the drying you just did.
- Season the sauce properlyUnsalted white sauce over unsalted toast is the reason milk toast has a dull reputation. Salt the sauce assertively and taste it before it goes near the bread.
- The hot-water dipDipping is a quick in-and-out, no more than a second or two per slice, and the slices should be drained before saucing. Bread left in the liquid goes sodden and no amount of sauce will rescue it.
- YieldSix slices of toast with 1 1/2 cups of sauce serves two or three as a supper dish, or six as an accompaniment. Layer the slices in a warmed deep dish and sauce between the layers as directed rather than pouring it all over the top.
- Bread to useThe recipe does not specify the bread. A firm white sandwich bread or a day-old country loaf works; heavily seeded or sour breads fight the sauce.
Milk toast belonged to the category of "invalid cookery" as much as to breakfast: soft, bland, warm, and easy to digest, it was what nineteenth- and early twentieth-century households fed the sick, the very young and the very old, and it appears in nursing manuals as well as in cookbooks. Stale bread was a constant surplus in kitchens that baked or bought a loaf daily, and toasting was a standard way to make dry bread palatable again before the sauce brought back the moisture. The cross-reference to "white sauce No. I" reflects how these books were built: a numbered set of basic sauces given once and invoked over and over so the individual recipes could stay a few lines long.