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Toast Water
Bread browned to the verge of burning, but not burned. soaked in water makes a nutricious drink for the sick.
An invalid drink rather than a beverage anyone would choose for pleasure, and the original gives no quantities at all. The one thing that matters is the colour of the bread: deep brown, dry, not one shade into black, since scorched crust turns the water bitter and acrid rather than faintly sweet.
- Working proportionsPeriod sickroom cookery commonly used something like a slice of toast to a pint of water, though the figure varies from book to book. The recipe as printed leaves this entirely to the cook.
- Water temperatureMany period versions pour boiling water over the toast, then cover it and leave it to stand until cold. Cold water would be expected to give a thinner, less sweet result.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve or muslin and discard the pulp. Left in, the sodden bread makes the drink cloudy and unpalatable, which defeats the purpose for a patient with no appetite.
- On "nutricious"The nourishment here is slight: chiefly a little dextrin and sugar from starch broken down by heat, with only traces of anything else. It was valued as something a fevered patient could keep down, not as food.
- KeepingMake it fresh each time. Bread and water at room temperature is an excellent medium for bacterial growth, and any left after a few hours should be thrown out.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity at all; period versions were often made by the pint and served in small glasses through the day, sometimes with a strip of lemon peel or a spoonful of sugar added while the water is still hot.
Toast water belongs to the nineteenth-century category of "invalid cookery," a body of recipes for barley water, beef tea, gruel, arrowroot and whey that occupied a chapter in nearly every general household manual of the period. The logic was dietetic rather than medicinal: a sick person was thought to need fluid and something faintly nourishing that made no demand on the digestion, and toasting bread was understood to make its starch more digestible, which is broadly true in that dry heat converts some starch to dextrins and simple sugars. Florence Nightingale, in Notes on Nursing (1859), warns more generally that such drinks and jellies were routinely mistaken for real nourishment. That a recipe of this kind should appear in a general household book at all reflects how thoroughly nursing the sick was treated as ordinary kitchen work rather than set apart.