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Buttered Toast
Cut bread a day old into 1-inch slices, put slices in a wire toaster or on a grate and place it some distance from the fire that it may dry gradually, and then brown as desired, and butter. Toast, if piled compactly and allowed to stand, soon becomes moist. It should be served as soon after toasting as possible.
A method rather than a formula, and the method is the point: dry the bread through before you color the surface. Everything else here is about timing the trip from heat to table.
- The hinge: dry first, brown secondHeld well back from the fire, the slice loses interior moisture before the outside takes color, which is what gives old-fashioned toast its crisp body all the way through. A modern pop-up toaster browns fast and leaves the center steamy; to follow the original, dry the slices in a 250-300F oven for 10-15 minutes, then finish under a broiler or in the toaster.
- One-inch slicesThat is roughly double a standard sandwich slice and thicker than most commercially sliced bread. Thick slices are what make the two-stage drying necessary; at half an inch the bread dries and browns at nearly the same rate.
- Day-old breadFresh bread is too wet and too tender to hold a slice this thick, and it tears under a knife. Any lean loaf a day past baking works; enriched sandwich breads with added fat and sugar brown much faster and need watching.
- Wire toaster or grateA wire frame or grate that held the bread before the fire. A broiler rack set a few inches from the element is the nearest equivalent, and it needs the same attention — no thermostat is protecting you.
- Butter while hotButter goes on the moment the toast leaves the heat so it melts into the surface rather than sitting on it. Salted butter was common in this period.
- Why not to stack itSteam escaping from the interior condenses between piled slices and softens the crust quickly. Stand the slices upright and apart — a toast rack exists for exactly this reason — and serve at once.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two thick slices per person suits a breakfast portion, one if it is going under creamed dishes, eggs or hash.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given to policyholders, part of a broad early-twentieth-century movement in which insurers, gas companies and flour millers distributed practical domestic instruction. That audience explains why a page is spent on buttered toast: the book assumes a reader who may be cooking on an open grate or a coal range with no calibrated heat, and it teaches control of distance from the fire rather than a temperature. Toast itself is far older than any of this — the word comes through Old French from Latin torrere, to parch or scorch — and drying bread at the hearth was for centuries as much a way of using up a stale loaf as a dish in its own right. Toast is also often said to have served as a base for creamed and chipped preparations of the kind found in books like this one, so getting it crisp and getting it to the table quickly mattered more than it might seem.