Skip to main content
Main

Lemon Toast

Lemon toast is bread dipped in egg and milk, fried, topped with a lemony egg white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Lemon Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the egg mixture

  1. Beat the egg yolks well and mix with the sweet milk.

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

Cook the toast

  1. Fry the dipped bread slices in hot melted butter until golden brown.

Make the lemon sauce and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to a froth and mix in the sugar.

  2. Add the lemon juice and boiling water to the egg white mixture.

  3. 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 and bread soak, adding richness and helping the slices brown and set.
Sweet milk
Soaks into the bread to moisten it and carry the egg mixture into the slices.
Baker's bread
Absorbs the egg and milk mixture, forming the soft interior of the toast.
Melted butter
Fries the soaked bread, adding fat for a golden brown crust and rich flavor.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they give the lemon sauce a light, airy foam.
White sugar
Sweetens the lemon sauce and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Fry the dipped bread slices in hot melted butter until golden brown.. If the butter is not hot enough, the soaked bread absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of browning. Hot fat sears the surface quickly, creating a golden crust while the custard-soaked interior cooks through.

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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes