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Breakfast

French Toast

A simple bread dish fried in a batter of eggs, milk, salt, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

French Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a batter by whisking together the eggs, milk, salt, and corn starch.

  2. If the bread is very dry, dip it in water first before battering.

  3. Dip thin slices of bread into the batter.

Cook

  1. Fry the bread in a well-buttered frying pan until brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set when cooked, giving the French toast structure and a custard-like body.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter so the bread stays soft inside.
Corn starch
Thickens the batter slightly, helping it cling to the bread and brown evenly.
Butter
Fat in the pan that carries heat and promotes browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Fry the bread in a well-buttered frying pan until brown. Enough butter keeps the bread from sticking and scorching, while steady heat sets the egg coating and browns the surface without burning it before the centre is cooked.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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