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Cinnamon Toast
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon Slightly stale bread Butter 1 cup granulated sugar Mix together the cinnamon and sugar and transfer to a shaker. Cut the bread 1-inch thick, trim off crusts, and toast quickly so that it will be soft in the middle. Butter generously, shake the cinnamon-mixture over, put together in pairs and cut in triangles. Place in a hot oven for a minute or two and serve on a folded napkin on a hot plate.
A simple thing done deliberately: thick slices, fast toasting, and a brief blast of oven heat to melt the sugar into the butter. The proportions here make far more cinnamon sugar than one round of toast needs.
- Hot ovenIn a book of this vintage a hot oven means roughly 425-450F. One or two minutes is all it takes to melt the butter and set the sugar; longer and the sugar scorches.
- Toast quicklyThe instruction to toast fast so the centre stays soft is the hinge of the recipe. Inch-thick bread under a broiler or in a very hot toaster oven colours the surface before the interior dries out, which is what distinguishes this from ordinary sugared toast.
- Slightly stale breadDay-old bread cuts cleanly at an inch and absorbs butter without collapsing. A firm white sandwich loaf or a plain pain de mie is closer to the intended crumb than an open, holey artisan loaf.
- The shakerA dredger or shaker with a perforated lid, the same tool used for flour and powdered sugar. A fine-mesh sieve or a spoon works; the point is an even, thin coat rather than drifts.
- Quantity of cinnamon sugarOne teaspoon of cinnamon to a cup of sugar yields about a cup of mixture, enough for many servings. It keeps well in a sealed jar, though the cinnamon fades over time; the recipe makes far more than one round of toast requires.
- Put together in pairsTwo buttered, sugared slices are sandwiched before cutting, so the sugar layer sits in the middle. The recipe has you cut into triangles first and only then give them a minute or two in the oven.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of bread. As a guide, six slices cut an inch thick would make three sandwiches and twelve triangles.
- The folded napkinA serving convention rather than a cooking step; it is usually explained as keeping the underside of the toast from steaming damp against the plate.
Cinnamon toast belongs to the long English and American tradition of dressed toasts, sweet and savoury, that carried the tea table and the nursery supper through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside anchovy toast, milk toast and Welsh rarebit. Economical uses for slightly stale bread sat naturally beside porridge and pancakes as things a household made from what was already in the kitchen. The insistence on thick slices, a soft centre and a hot plate marks it as a served dish rather than a snack, and the folded napkin under it is the same bit of table dressing that appeared under fried fish and hot rolls in period service manuals.