Not-so-fancy toast toppers from the 1920s

Having a New Year's Eve party? If you need appetizers, you can put some toppings onto slices of toast and cut them into little squares! Or if you're not social enough to want a party, you might still want some toast topping recipes if your resolution is to eat more breakfast. Or maybe you don't care about toast no matter how much I try to talk you into it. The point is that today I'm posting  really old toast topping recipes from The Science of Food and Cookery (H. S. Anderson, 1921).

If prior to reading this book I were asked to guess what kind of toast a 100+-year-old health food cookbook instructed readers to make, there's a pretty good chance I would have guessed prune toast.

Yep-- I would have been right. Old cookbooks really have a thing for prunes. I would not have foreseen that the toast itself would be dipped in hot milk or prune juice to soften it up before spreading it with prune mush, though. I guess the zwieback must have been really dry. (I guess this also makes prune toast not a great choice for parties, but hey, the fact that it's prunes is probably reason enough before we also contend with it being soggy.)

I'm sure I would have imagined creamed peas as a recipe in the book-- probably in the vegetable chapter. I wasn't really expecting them to be listed as a toast-topper, though.

I guess it makes sense, though-- a little extra protein for the morning. I would have expected a peanut butter toast for that role, though (especially since peanut butter toast is one of my favorite warm-weather breakfasts). The closest the book comes is walnut cream toast.

Yep-- white sauce draped over over a bread product so hard it has to be dunked in hot milk before it's sauced, and then a sprinkle of finely chopped walnuts to make it seem fancier. (Okay, none of these would work well as apps, but you could probably have guessed I wouldn't really choose anything that sounded too good for the role anyway.)

The last recipe made me laugh just because of its title. Considering how angry people on the far right got about millennials eating avocado toast a few years ago, I half-expected Snowflake Toast to be topped with avocadoes.

Nope. This one is just white sauce lightened up with a whipped egg white. Whee.

Reading through the toast list made me understand why the family at the start of the chapter looks so eerie.

Even drawings of people who supposedly live on this book's recipes can't work up too much enthusiasm for them. The boy looks like he's been threatened with a beating if he doesn't act like he thinks the breakfast chapter is great, and you can see the strain of pretense in his eyes. Mom is giving side-eye to the menacing illustrator, but she's too goddamn tired to intervene. What a glorious start to the day-- or the new year.