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Soft Buttered Toast
Toast six or eight slices of stale bread. Melt one-fourth cup butter in half a cup of boiling water in a bowl. Quickly dip each slice of toast in it, place in hot dish, and pour remainder of "dip" over all.
A three-line recipe with one real technique in it: the butter is emulsified into hot water so the toast absorbs it evenly instead of soaking through in patches.
- The hingeStir the melted butter through the boiling water and keep the bowl warm. The recipe says only to melt the butter in the water, and butter and water will not stay combined for long without agitation. If the mixture separates, the toast takes on water first and greases only on the surface.
- Speed matters"Quickly dip" means a brief dip rather than a soak. Toast left in the dip turns to sop; the point is a slice that stays crisp at the edge and yields in the middle.
- QuantitiesOne-fourth cup butter is 2 oz or 4 tablespoons; half a cup of water is 4 fl oz. That is generous for six slices, which is why the remainder gets poured over the dish.
- The breadStale bread is not a compromise here. Day-old crumb is drier and firmer, so it takes the dip without collapsing. Fresh sandwich bread will go to mush.
- SaltHousehold butter of this period was commonly salted, salting being the usual way of keeping it. With unsalted butter the dish will taste flat; a pinch in the water compensates.
- ServingServes three or four as a breakfast or supper dish, and it will not hold. Warm the serving dish and bring it straight to the table before the toast softens through.
Buttered toast dipped in hot water is best understood as a thrift technique rather than a garnish: hot water would carry the butter into the bread so that a small amount of an expensive ingredient flavored a whole plateful, and something like the same trick seems to underlie the milk toast, cream toast and water toast that fill the bread chapters of period cookbooks. Whatever the setting, stale bread was among the most common surpluses in a household that baked or bought bread daily. Dishes of this kind were also often used in invalid and nursery cookery, being soft, warm and easy to eat, and they appear under those headings in a number of nineteenth-century domestic manuals alongside gruels and beef teas.