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Brown Bread Toast
Cut the bread in slices and toast. Put it in the dish r the table, take a bowl of thick cream, add a little It, then pour over the toast; put it in the oven until heats through.
A plain supper dish of toasted brown bread soaked in salted cream and warmed through. It succeeds or fails on the bread, which must be sturdy enough to drink the cream without collapsing.
- What "brown bread" means hereIn a late nineteenth-century American kitchen this is usually a steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf or a coarse wholemeal loaf, not a modern sandwich wheat bread. A dense wholegrain or a steamed Boston brown bread cut about half an inch thick gives the right texture.
- Toast it dry and hardThe toast is meant to be crisp on both faces before the cream goes on. Soft toast turns to paste the moment it is soaked.
- The cream"Thick cream" means heavy cream, roughly 36 percent fat or better, not half-and-half. Allow about a cup for four slices; the bread should be soaked but not swimming.
- SeasoningThe text is damaged here ("add a little It"), almost certainly salt. Stir it into the cream rather than sprinkling it on the toast so it distributes evenly; a quarter teaspoon per cup of cream is a reasonable starting point.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature, only "put it in the oven until heats through". A moderate oven of about 350F for eight to ten minutes will heat it through and set the surface; left much longer, the cream may break.
- DishUse a shallow baking dish rather than a deep one so the slices sit in a single layer and the tops stay slightly crisp.
- Yield and servingFour slices serve two as a light supper or breakfast. It wants eating immediately; it does not hold or reheat.
Cream toast in its various forms was a standby of the nineteenth-century American table, sitting somewhere between an invalid's dish and a cheap hot supper: stale bread, revived by toasting, and whatever dairy the house had. Brown bread gave the version above its character, and in New England that generally meant the steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf associated with baked beans and Saturday night. Community compilations of the period are full of such thrifty uses of yesterday's loaf, and versions using a flour-thickened milk gravy in place of cream also circulated.