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French Toast, or Fairy Bread

A dish of bread dipped in beaten eggs and milk, fried in lard, and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,655 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

French Toast, or Fairy Bread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until very light.

  2. Stir in the milk.

Fry and serve

  1. Slice the baker's bread and dip each piece into the egg and milk mixture.

  2. Fry the dipped bread in hot lard until golden brown on both sides.

  3. Sprinkle sugar and ground cinnamon on each piece before serving hot.

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 + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  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. Bread + cinnamontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,705 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Set when fried and bind the milk to the bread, giving structure to the coating.
Milk
Moistens the bread so it soaks up the egg mixture and stays tender inside.
Baker's bread
Soaks up the egg and milk mixture, forming the body of the dish.
Hot lard
Conducts heat to brown the surface of the soaked bread in the pan.

The step that matters

Fry the dipped bread in hot lard until golden brown on both sides. If the lard is not hot enough, the bread absorbs fat and turns greasy before its surface browns. Enough heat sets the egg coating quickly and gives browning through the Maillard reaction.

“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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