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Breakfast

French Toast

A slice of dry bread dipped in beaten egg, milk, and salt, then fried until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg in a bowl.

  2. Add the sweet milk and salt to the egg and mix well.

Dip and fry

  1. Dip the slices of dry bread into the mixture.

  2. Fry the dipped bread slices in a pan until they are 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

Egg
Binds the milk and bread together and sets to a firm, cooked coating in the pan.
Sweet milk
Thins the egg into a batter that soaks into the bread and keeps it moist.
Dry bread
Absorbs the batter and browns in the pan, giving a soft center and golden surface.

The step that matters

Dip the bread briefly. Soaking the bread too long makes it soggy and fragile, so it falls apart in the pan. A quick dip lets the batter coat the surface and set when fried.

“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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