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French Toast

A dish of bread slices dipped in an egg and milk batter, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk.

  2. Add flour gradually until you achieve a thick batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip the slices of old bread into the batter, ensuring they are well coated.

  2. In a skillet, melt butter over medium heat and fry the coated bread slices until golden brown on both sides.

  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. 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help the bread set and hold together while frying.
Milk
Adds moisture to the batter so the bread softens and cooks through.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it coats the bread rather than running off.
Old bread
Absorbs the batter and forms the body of the dish once fried.
Butter
Fat that browns the coated bread in the pan and adds flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the coated bread. Medium heat lets the batter set and the outside turn golden brown while the inside heats through. Browning from butter and sugars depends on controlled heat, so high heat can scorch the surface before the center cooks.

“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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