Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Toast
Toast
Toast the bread very quickly, dip each slice in boiling water, (a little salt in the water), as soon as you have toasted it; then spread it with butter; cover and keep hot as you proceed. Make milk toast in the same way, keeping the milk at nearly boiling heat; it is better to spread the butter on the bread after it is dipped in hot milk, than to melt it in the milk; thicken what milk is left with a little corn starch, and pour over the toast when sent to the table.
Two related dishes in one paragraph: water toast and milk toast, both built on the same trick of moistening hot toast the instant it comes off the fire. The hinge is speed and brevity — the dip is a second or two, not a soak.
- The dip is instantaneousSlide each slice through the boiling salted water and lift it straight out. More than a second or two and the crumb collapses into paste; the point is to soften the surface while the interior stays intact.
- "Toast very quickly" means high heatIn 1876 that would have meant holding bread close to a clear fire or against the open door of a hot range. A hot broiler gives the same result: browned outside, still soft within, which is what survives the dipping.
- BreadUse a firm white loaf, day-old, cut about half an inch thick. Modern soft sandwich bread has neither the structure nor the crumb to hold up to hot liquid.
- Butter after, not beforeIn the water version the butter goes on once the slice is dipped. In the milk version the recipe's point is slightly different: butter the bread rather than melting it into the milk, so it sits on the slice instead of dispersing in the liquid.
- Milk at "nearly boiling"Scalding point, around 180F. Milk brought to a full rolling boil catches on the pan bottom and takes on a cooked flavour that the dish cannot hide.
- The cornstarch sauceNo proportion is given. About 2 teaspoons cornstarch slaked in a little cold milk per cup of hot milk gives a pouring sauce; stir it in off the heat, then return to a simmer for a minute to cook out the starch. Season with salt.
- Keeping it hotThe recipe says only to cover the slices and keep them hot as you work through the rest; a covered dish somewhere warm, or a very low oven, will do. Assembled toast does not wait long — the sauce should go over just as it goes to table.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Two slices per person makes a light supper or breakfast; the sauce is thickened from whatever milk remains after the dipping.
Milk toast belonged to the sickroom as much as the breakfast table. Through the nineteenth century it was the standard convalescent food in English and American households — bland, warm, soft, and cheap — and it turns up in invalid-cookery chapters as reliably as beef tea and gruel. Water toast is the plainer sibling here. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in 1876 from contributions by local women and sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless, is exactly the kind of book that would print both: practical, thrifty, assuming a coal range and a cook who already knows what a clear fire looks like. The cornstarch finish is a small marker of its date, since commercially milled cornstarch had become a cheap pantry staple in the United States by the 1870s.