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Breakfast

French Toast

A dish of stale bread soaked in milk, beaten eggs, fried in butter, and dusted with powdered sugar and optional lemon peel or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

  1. Soak the stale bread slices in milk for 1 minute.

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and add a pinch of salt.

  3. Heat butter in a griddle.

Cook and serve

  1. Dip each soaked bread slice in the beaten egg and place in the hot butter.

  2. Fry until light brown, then turn and fry the other side.

  3. Once done, place on a warm platter and sprinkle with powdered sugar mixed with grated lemon peel or cinnamon.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 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

Stale bread
Its dry, porous crumb soaks up milk and egg, giving a custardy interior.
Eggs
Egg coats the bread and sets when fried, forming a golden crust and binding the slices.
Milk
Milk softens the bread and adds moisture so the interior stays tender while frying.
Butter
Butter fries the coated bread, adding fat for browning and a rich flavor.

The step that matters

Fry until light brown, then turn. Medium heat in the butter lets the egg set and the surface brown evenly before turning. Too high a heat scorches the outside while the centre stays wet.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, butter, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, 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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