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Breakfast

French Toast

French toast is bread soaked in milk and eggs, then fried in hot fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

French Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the crust from the sliced bread.

  2. Mix the milk with the beaten eggs and season with salt.

  3. Soak each piece of bread in the mixture one at a time.

Fry

  1. Fry the soaked bread in hot fat until golden brown.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Eggs
Bind the milk and set the bread's coating so it holds together when fried.
Milk
Moistens the bread and softens the custard coating for a tender interior.
Sliced bread
Absorbs the egg-milk mixture and becomes the crisp, browned structure when fried.

The step that matters

Soak each piece one at a time. Bread soaks up liquid quickly, so if it stays too long it turns soggy and falls apart in the hot fat. A brief, even soak lets the egg coat the surface, which then browns well and holds the slice together.

“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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