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Drink

Toast and Water

A beverage made by steeping toasted stale bread in boiling water, then cooling with cold filtered water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Toast and Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the slice of stale bread until it is evenly browned but not burnt.

Steep and strain

  1. Pour the boiling water over the toasted bread and let it sit until cold.

  2. Filter the mixture and transfer it to a decanter.

  3. For quicker preparation, cover the bread with boiling water, let it cool, then add cold filtered water to fill the jug.

Serve

  1. Serve the toast-water cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Toasting browns the bread, adding roasted flavour and colour to the water as it steeps.

The step that matters

Toast until evenly browned, not burnt. Browning drives Maillard reactions that create roasted, nutty flavours. Burnt bread adds acrid bitterness that carries into the steeped water, so the toast must be coloured evenly and stopped before it darkens.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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