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Breakfast

Queen Esther Toast

A toasted bread soaked in milk, beaten eggs, fried in butter, topped with cinnamon and a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Queen Esther Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Slice the bread and remove the crusts.

  2. Place the sliced bread on a plate.

  3. Pour enough milk over the bread to absorb.

Make the egg coating

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Pour the beaten eggs over the bread once the milk is absorbed.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the bread in butter until golden brown.

  2. Sprinkle cinnamon on top.

  3. Prepare a syrup by dissolving sugar in water.

  4. Pour the syrup over the toast.

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 + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the milk and egg and becomes the toast.
Milk
Softens the bread so it absorbs the egg mixture evenly.
Eggs
Set when fried, forming a golden, custardy coating around the bread.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the coating brown and gives a rich flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup that is poured over the toast.

The step that matters

Let the bread absorb the milk before adding the egg. If the bread is still dry in the centre, it will not soak up the beaten egg evenly, leaving dry patches and an uneven coating after frying.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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