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Dessert

A French Dessert

A French dessert of soaked bread slices fried in butter after being beaten with eggs, milk, sugar, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

A French Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk, sugar, and flavoring, and mix well.

  3. Soak the bread slices in the mixture until fully saturated.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the soaked bread slices in the hot butter until golden brown.

  3. Serve warm.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and give the soaked bread a firm, sliceable structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks into the bread and keeps the interior moist.
Bread slices
Absorb the custard, becoming soft inside while the outside crisps when fried.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the surface.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the soaked bread until golden brown. Saturated bread is fragile and can burn on the outside before the custard inside sets. Medium heat lets sugars and milk proteins brown gradually through the Maillard reaction while the centre 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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