Skip to main content
Breakfast

French Toast

A simple dish of stale bread dipped in egg and milk, fried until golden and served hot with jelly or butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg lightly in a shallow dish.

  2. Add the salt and milk to the egg and mix well.

  3. Dip each slice of stale bread in the egg mixture, turning to coat.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a griddle over medium heat and add butter to coat.

  2. Place the dipped bread on the hot griddle and brown on one side.

  3. Add a small piece of butter on top of each slice, then flip and brown the other side.

  4. Serve hot with jelly or butter and sugar.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Binds the dip and sets during cooking to give the bread structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the bread so the egg mixture soaks in.
Stale bread
Dry crumb soaks up the custard without falling apart.
Butter
Fat that browns the surface of the bread and adds flavor.

The step that matters

Browning the bread on medium heat. Medium heat lets the egg custard cook through and set while the surface browns, so the centre is not raw. Too high a heat scorches the outside before the inside sets.

“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.

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes