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Toast Water
Good in cases of nausea.
Two slices of bread toasted until thoroughly dextrinized, 1 cup boiling water.
Break toast in pieces, add water and allow to stand one hour. Strain through cheese cloth, season and serve hot or cold.
White 1 egg
A sickroom drink from the era before commercial broths and electrolyte solutions. The base is bread and boiling water; the trailing line about egg white is what takes it out of range.
- The raw egg whiteThe recipe ends with "White 1 egg" — an unbeaten raw white stirred in or whipped and floated on top, a standard invalid-cookery addition meant to add protein. Raw egg white carries a Salmonella risk, and the liquid here is never heated after the egg goes in. The people this drink was made for — the nauseated, the feverish, the convalescent — are precisely those least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. Use a current recipe if you want a fortified sickroom drink.
- "Thoroughly dextrinized"Dextrinization is the browning of starch into shorter, sweeter dextrins. In practice it means toasting the bread hard and evenly to a deep brown all the way through, not merely tanning the surface. Scorched black bread makes the water bitter.
- The bread meant hereThe recipe does not say what bread to use. A lean white loaf is the likeliest intent; modern enriched loaves with added sugar brown faster and can taste cloying, so a plain white bread or a baguette slice is a closer substitute.
- Proportions and yieldTwo slices to one cup of water yields noticeably less than a cup once the bread has absorbed its share and been strained out. A single small serving.
- "Season"Salt, and in some versions a little sugar and lemon. The book assumes the cook knows; a pinch of salt is what makes it drinkable rather than pasty.
- The hour of standingThe original says only to let it stand one hour, without specifying where or at what temperature; left out warm that is a long sit for a starchy infusion. Steeping covered and then refrigerating is the sensible handling of the base liquid.
Toast water was one of the standard articles of nineteenth-century invalid cookery, alongside barley water, beef tea and gruel — bland, nearly clear liquids given when nothing else would stay down. The theory behind "dextrinized" toast was current nutritional science of the day: browning breaks starch into dextrins, which were understood to be more readily digested than raw starch, so the drink was thought to deliver a little nourishment without taxing the stomach. Invalid-cookery sections of this kind were a common feature of general household books of the period, because home nursing was home work; a family expected to feed its own sick through a long convalescence, and the cook was often the nurse. The raw egg white fits the same logic — a cheap, bland protein added where a patient needed building up. The habit persisted in domestic manuals well into the twentieth century.