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French Toast

A dish of bread dipped in beaten eggs and milk, then fried in lard.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add sweet milk and salt, and mix well.

  3. Slice the cold bread.

Fry

  1. Dip each slice in the egg and milk mixture.

  2. Fry in hot lard until light 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. Egg + milktop 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 batter and set into a tender custard coating on the bread.
Sweet milk
Thins the egg mixture and keeps the coating moist and soft inside.
Cold bread
Soaks up the egg mixture to form the body of the toast.
Lard
Fries the slices, crisping the outside and browning them evenly.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard until light brown. If the lard is not hot enough, the bread soaks up fat and turns greasy before the egg sets. Too hot, and the outside browns before the custard inside cooks through.

“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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