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Buttered Toast
Although toast is commonly used, few know how to prepare it nicely. Take bread not too fresh, cut thin and evenly, trim off the crust-edges for the crumb-jar; first warm each side of the bread, then present the first side again to the fire until it takes on a rich, even, brown color; treat the other side in the same way; butter and serve immediately. The coals should be bright and hot. Toast properly made is very digestible, because all the moisture is extracted, and the bread has become pure farina of wheat; but when it is exposed to a hot fire and the outside charred, the inside remains as moist as ever, and butter applied to it while warm does not penetrate, but floats on the surface in the form of rancid oil. Or, beat one cup of butter and three table-spoons flour to a cream, pour over this one and a half pints boiling water; place over a kettle of boiling water for ten minutes, dip into it the toast, and serve hot.
Or, dip each slice of toast in boiling hot water (slightly salted), spread with butter, cover and keep hot. with butter , cover and keep hot.
Three methods sit in one paragraph here: dry buttered toast made at the fire, toast in a butter sauce, and toast dipped in salted water. The first is the one the writer cares about, and its technique still works under a broiler.
- Warm both sides firstThe hinge of the whole thing. Warming each side before browning drives moisture out of the crumb, so the interior dries as the surface colours. Skip it and you get a charred face over damp bread, which is exactly the failure the text describes.
- Heat source"Bright and hot" coals mean radiant heat at a distance, not a flame licking the bread. A broiler set on high with the rack about four inches down is the closest modern equivalent; a pop-up toaster on a low setting run twice gets you most of the way.
- Bread"Not too fresh" points to day-old bread. A close-crumbed white loaf cut thin, around a quarter to three-eighths of an inch, suits the method; modern soft sandwich bread is usually sweeter and tends to colour before it dries.
- The crumb-jarA standing container of dried trimmings and stale bread, kept for crumbing cutlets and thickening puddings. Trimmed crusts still work that way, though they need to be fully dry before storing or they mould.
- The butter sauce, in modern amountsOne cup butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1.5 pints (3 cups) boiling water make a very thin, very rich sauce -- closer to a butter broth than a gravy. Halving the butter gives something many will find more palatable, and it will still coat the toast.
- "Place over a kettle of boiling water"A double boiler. Ten minutes over simmering water cooks out the raw flour taste and is gentler than direct heat, over which the sauce is more likely to separate.
- The dipped versionSlices dipped in salted boiling water and buttered is what nineteenth-century cookery called water toast, a plain invalid dish. Dip briefly -- a second or two -- or the bread collapses.
- On "pure farina of wheat"The chemistry is period folk science. Toasting dries the surface and browns starches and proteins; it does not convert bread into flour, and toast is not meaningfully more digestible than bread.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantity of sauce made is enough to dip a good many slices.
Buttered toast earned a page in books like this because making it at an open fire or coal range was a real skill, not a button: the cook held bread on a long-handled toasting fork at a judged distance from the coals, and the difference between good toast and scorched damp bread was entirely in how she managed that distance. The two variants tacked on at the end belong to the large nineteenth-century family of "made" toasts -- water toast, milk toast, cream toast -- soft, sopped dishes served to invalids, small children and the elderly, and eaten at supper or tea when something light was wanted. The Dixie Cook Book is generally traced to the compiling work of Estelle Woods Wilcox, whose Buckeye Cookery and its regional reissues recycled much of the same material for different markets, which is why a Southern collection carries a passage of stern general instruction on toast alongside its beaten biscuit and batter cakes.