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French Toast

A simple dish of stale bread dipped in egg and milk batter, fried in lard, served with sugar, cinnamon, and butter.

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 ↓

French Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cut stale bread into slices.

  2. In a bowl, whisk together the egg and milk, then add flour to create a thin batter.

  3. Dip the crust of the bread in hot water, then coat both sides in the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the bread in hot lard until browned.

  2. Serve hot with sugar, cinnamon, and butter.

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. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Stale bread
Provides the structure that soaks up the batter and holds its shape when fried.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps it set and brown in the hot fat.
Milk
Moistens the batter so the bread softens and the interior stays tender.
Flour
Thickens the milk and egg mixture so it coats the bread in a thin layer.
Lard
Conducts heat to fry the coated bread, producing a browned, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Fry the bread in hot lard until browned. Frying in hot fat sets the batter quickly and browns it through the Maillard reaction; if the fat is too cool, the bread absorbs grease and turns soggy rather than crisp.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, milk, flour, sugar, butter. 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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