Milk toast is a breakfast food consisting of toasted bread in warm milk, typically with sugar and butter.[1] Salt, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, cocoa, raisins and other ingredients may be added.[2] In New England, milk toast refers to toast that has been dipped in a milk-based white sauce.[3] Milk toast was a popular food throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially for young children and for the ailing, for whom the food was thought to be soothing and easy to digest.[1] Although not as popular today, milk toast is still considered a comfort food.[2][4][5][6]
The celebrated food writer M. F. K. Fisher called milk toast a "warm, mild, soothing thing, full of innocent strength", and wrote, of eating milk toast in a famed restaurant with a convalescent friend, that the food was "a small modern miracle of gastronomy". She notes that even her homeliest kitchen manuals do not list it under Feeding The Sick or Invalid Receipts, arguing that milk toast was "an instinctive palliative, something like boiled water".[1]
Fisher also notes that for true comfort, a ritual may be necessary, and for Milk Toast people, the dish used may be foolishly important. Her favorite version of milk toast has the milk mixed 50/50 with Campbell's condensed cream of tomato soup in a wide-lipped pitcher called a boccalino in Italian Switzerland where she got it.[2]
Milk toast's soft blandness served as inspiration for the name of the timid and ineffectual comic strip character Caspar Milquetoast, drawn by H. T. Webster from 1924 to 1952.[7] Thus, the term "milquetoast" entered the language as the label for a timid, shrinking, apologetic person.
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There is a dessert called milk toast which is served in many Asian milk tea cafes in Asia and the United States. It consists of thick, enriched toasted white bread with condensed milk on top.
There is also a dessert similar to milk toast which is served any time of the day. Best with fresh warm milk and day old bread.
A traditional Scandinavian dish similar to milk toast is called soll in Norwegian and bryta in Swedish. It consists of broken flatbrød (wafer-thin, crisp bread), tunnbröd or dry bread served in a bowl of cold milk (often filmjölk) and sweetened with sugar etc. Soll was a everyday dish for peasants in the countryside, especially served as a simple supper in the evening. During the winter soll sometimes were served as breakfast with warmed milk.