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Excellent Toast
Cut slices of a uniform thickness, of half an inch; move around over a brisk fire, to have all parts toasted alike; keep only so near the coals that the pieces will be heated through when both sides are well browned. If the slightest point is blackened or charred, scrape it off, or it will spoil the flavor of the whole. If covered with an earthen bowl, it will keep both warm and moist. A clean towel or napkin will answer if it is to go at once to the table. Stale bread may be used for milk-toast; sour bread may be improved by toasting it through, but sweet, light bread, only a day old or less, makes the best toast.
This is toast made over live coals, and the instructions assume a fire rather than a slot toaster. The advice about thickness, even browning and holding the finished slices still applies.
- The fire"A brisk fire" here means glowing coals with no flame, held at a distance where the bread heats through before the surface burns. A broiler element set to high with the rack about 5 inches down is the nearest modern equivalent, and the bread needs turning and shifting as the original says, since broilers heat unevenly.
- Half-inch slicesThicker than most standard commercial sandwich slices, which generally run somewhat thinner. Cut your own from an unsliced loaf if you want the result the recipe describes: the interior should end up hot and still soft, not dried through.
- Scrape off the charThis is the hinge of the whole entry. Burnt spots carry bitterness through the entire slice, and scraping with the back of a knife over the sink is faster than starting again.
- Holding it warmAn inverted earthen bowl traps steam and keeps the crumb moist, which is what you want for milk-toast. For crisp toast do the opposite and stand the slices upright so steam escapes, which is exactly what a toast rack is for.
- Milk-toastThe recipe assumes you know it: toasted bread laid in a dish and covered with hot milk, usually salted and buttered, sometimes lightly thickened. The recipe permits stale bread here without saying why; stale bread does tend to take up liquid without collapsing.
- Sour breadThis means bread whose dough has over-fermented and gone acidic, a common problem with homemade yeast and unreliable warm spots. The recipe holds that toasting it through improves it. It is not a reference to modern sourdough, which is soured on purpose.
- Bread ageA day old or less is called best because it still has moisture to lose. Anything drier browns before it warms and comes out brittle.
Instructions this careful about toast make sense only in a kitchen without a toaster. Nineteenth-century American cooks worked at a range or open hearth, and bread was toasted on a fork or a hinged wire toaster held over coals, which meant constant attention to distance and turning. The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s, sits in the tradition of the big compendious household manuals that treated even the simplest operations as skills worth teaching, because a young housekeeper might genuinely never have been shown. The passage also reflects a bread supply that was mostly homemade and therefore variable: sour loaves, stale loaves and heavy loaves were routine problems, and much of the era's cookery writing is quietly concerned with salvaging them. Milk-toast, mentioned here in passing, was standard invalid and children's food throughout the century, and appears in American cookbooks well into the twentieth.