Posts

Showing posts from June, 2018

The Mary Frances Cook Book: Toast

Image
The very first recipes in The Mary Frances Cook Book focus on something that is still very often the first thing one learns to cook: toast. Toast in 1912 was cooked with a bit of a different method to today, though. The first difference in method one notices is that Mary Frances has to slice the bread herself. And there seems to be a preference to use stale bread, and cut off the crusts. I couldn't actually find unsliced bread at the supermarket, so I opted for a thickly-sliced white loaf instead. It's likely the bread Mary Frances used was white bread since brown bread and multigrain breads were more associated with lower classes  back then . Each piece was about half an inch thick, and I let it sit on the kitchen bench for 2 days before I used it so it could go stale. How did her hair stay so curly with this crustless bread? The wire toaster that Mary Frances uses, poor fellow getting his head held in the fire and burnt up, is a prime example of the toasters that we