Milk toast is a breakfast dish consisting of toasted bread in warm milk, typically with sugar and butter. Salt, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, cocoa, raisins or other ingredients may be added. In the New England region of the United States, milk toast refers to toast that has been dipped in a milk-based white sauce.
Milk toast was a popular food throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially for young children and for the convalescent, for whom the dish was thought to be soothing and easy to digest. Although not as popular in the 2000s, milk toast is still considered a comfort food.
The food writer M. F. K. Fisher (1908–1992) 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 dish was "a small modern miracle of gastronomy". She notes that her homeliest kitchen manuals even list it under "Feeding The Sick" or "Invalid Recipes", arguing that milk toast was "an instinctive palliative, something like boiled water". 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.