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Lemon Toast

A toast served with a lemony sauce made from egg yolks, milk, sugar, and lemon juice.

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

Lemon Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soaking custard

  1. Beat the yolks of 6 eggs well.

  2. Mix the beaten yolks with 3 cups of stale sweet milk.

  3. Dip the sliced bread into the milk and egg mixture.

Fry the toast

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

Make the lemon sauce and serve

  1. Beat the 6 egg whites to a froth.

  2. Gradually add 1 cup of white sugar to the frothy whites.

  3. Stir in the juice of 2 lemons.

  4. Stir in 2 cups of boiling water.

  5. 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 soak and help the bread brown and set when fried.
Stale sweet milk
Soaks into the bread to give a moist, custardy interior.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth to lighten the lemon sauce.
White sugar
Sweetens the lemon sauce and adds body when whipped with the whites.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the dipped bread until golden brown. Bread soaked in egg and milk browns quickly in the fat and can scorch on the outside before the centre is cooked. Moderate heat lets the custard set through while the crust turns golden.

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.

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