Skip to main content
Breakfast

French Egg Toast

A toast topped with a hot milk‑flour‑butter mixture and chopped hard‑boiled eggs, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

French Egg Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the bread slices until they are a delicate brown.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the milk, flour, butter, salt, and pepper. Heat until hot.

  3. Mix in the chopped whites of the hard-boiled eggs.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the toasted bread.

  2. Grate the yolks of the eggs over each portion.

  3. Garnish with parsley and serve immediately.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the hot sauce and holds its shape.
Milk
Provides the liquid that becomes a warm, creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Whites add texture to the sauce; grated yolks add richness on top.

The step that matters

Heat the milk, flour and butter until thickened. Flour must be heated in the liquid so its starch swells and thickens the sauce. Stirring keeps it smooth and prevents lumps from forming.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, flour, butter, pepper, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, flour, butter, pepper, egg. 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.

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes