Seasons greetings from Caspar Milquetoast Mild and soothing, milk toast is a comfort food from way back.  In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, it was a common breakfast dish.  It’s a simple recipe: toasted bread in warm milk, usually with sugar and/or butter added.  For a little more flavor, you could add salt, raisins, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, cocoa, maple syrup, cumin, fruit… whatever you had lying around the kitchen.  Because it was considered such a mild, soothing dish, it was often recommended to convalescents by doctors as a food that would avoid upsetting their patients’ constitutions. Milk toast is a recipe that Americans borrowed from Europe, where varieties of this simple dish are found all over, probably introduced by immigrants and tinkered with by cooks all over the country.  It doesn’t have to be bland, but it has long had that reputation. Perhaps because of that reputation, fairly or unfairly, this largely forgo...