thumb|Traditional milktoast
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.
thumb|200px|A version of milk toast consisting of toasted buttermilk bread covered in [[white sauce with a dash of cinnamon]]
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.
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 dish was "a small modern miracle of gastronomy". She notes that her homeliest kitchen manuals list it under "Feeding The Sick" or "Invalid Recipes", arguing that milk toast was "an instinctive palliative, something like boiled water". Thus, the term milquetoast entered the language as the label for a timid, shrinking, apologetic person.
See also
- Sop
- Trencher
- Raisin toast
- French toast
- Bread and butter pudding
- List of bread dishes
- List of toast dishes