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Breakfast

French Toast

A simple bread dish fried in a thin batter of egg, milk, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

French Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the egg and mix in a pinch of salt.

  2. Add the milk and enough flour to create a thin batter.

  3. Cut the bread into slices and then cut each slice in half.

  4. Dip the bread pieces into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the lard in a kettle until it is smoking in the center.

  2. Fry the dipped bread until browned, turning the slices in the lard.

  3. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg
Binds the batter and helps it coat the bread and set when fried.
Milk
Thins the batter and adds moisture so the bread stays soft inside.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it clings to the bread instead of running off.
Bread
Soaks up the batter and becomes a tender interior with a crisp, browned surface.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and browns the coated bread through direct contact.

The step that matters

Fry the dipped bread until browned. The lard must be hot enough to brown the batter quickly; if it is too cool, the bread absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp.

“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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