Home › Cereals, Batters and Doughs › Cream Toast
Cream Toast
Dip slices of toast into white sauce (see page 29). Pour remaining sauce on the pieces of toast and serve hot.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on a sauce printed elsewhere in the book. Make the sauce properly and the dish works; treat it as an afterthought and you get soggy bread in wallpaper paste.
- The white sauceThe referenced page is not reproduced here; a medium white sauce of this period typically ran about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, salted to taste. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before the milk goes in, then simmer 3-4 minutes so the starch loses its raw taste.
- Consistency is the hingeThe sauce must be thin enough to soak in but thick enough to coat — roughly the body of heavy cream. Too thick and the toast stays dry under a rubbery blanket; too thin and it collapses.
- Toast it hardDry, well-browned toast holds up to dipping. Soft or lightly coloured bread disintegrates on contact. Do not butter it first: the butter is already in the sauce and blocks absorption.
- Dip, do not soakA second or two on each side is enough. Serve immediately — this dish does not wait, and reheated cream toast turns to porridge.
- SeasoningMilk-and-flour sauce needs more salt than cooks expect, plus white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if you like. Since the recipe adds nothing at the table, any seasoning has to come from the sauce itself.
- YieldIf the sauce is made in a one-cup batch, it will dress roughly four slices, enough for two at breakfast or supper.
Cream toast, milk toast and their close relations were staples of the American invalid tray and the nursery table from the mid-nineteenth century onward — soft, bland, warm, and made from bread that had gone slightly stale. Household manuals recommended them for the sick and for children precisely because they were undemanding. The same white sauce, cross-referenced once and reused a dozen times, is the organising principle of books like this one: learn the sauce, and creamed chipped beef, creamed eggs and creamed vegetables all follow from it. Its appearance in a cook book of this kind reflects an interest in cheap, digestible, respectable meals rather than in cooking for pleasure.