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Lemon Toast

A toast served with a lemony sauce made from egg whites, sugar, lemon juice, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Lemon Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soaking mixture

  1. Beat the egg yolks well and mix with the sweet milk.

  2. Dip the bread slices into the milk and egg mixture.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry the dipped bread slices in hot melted butter until golden brown.

  2. Beat the egg whites to a froth and mix in the sugar.

  3. Add the lemon juice and boiling water to the egg white mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve the lemon sauce 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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the milk mixture and add richness and colour to the bread coating.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they add airy lightness to the lemon sauce.
Sweet milk
Soaks into the bread, moistening it before frying.
White sugar
Sweetens the lemon sauce and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the dipped bread slices in hot melted butter until golden brown.. If the butter is not hot enough, the bread absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of browning. Enough heat sets the egg coating quickly and creates a golden crust.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, bread, 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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