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Lemon Toast

A toast served with a lemon 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Beat the egg yolks well.

  2. Mix the beaten yolks with the sweet milk.

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

  4. Fry the dipped bread in a hot skillet with melted butter until golden brown.

Make the lemon sauce

  1. Beat the egg whites to a froth.

  2. Mix the frothy egg whites with the sugar.

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

  4. 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 dip and help the bread brown and set when fried.
Egg whites
Beaten to a froth, they add lightness and airy body to the sauce.
Sweet milk
Moistens the bread and carries the egg into it for a custardy interior.
White sugar
Sweetens the sauce and stabilises the whipped egg whites.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet sauce and cuts its richness.

The step that matters

Heating the lemon sauce well. Egg whites and yolks must be heated enough to thicken the sauce, but not so hard that they scramble. Heating gently while combining the boiling water and lemon juice helps the sauce turn smooth rather than grainy.

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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