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Egg Toast

Egg Toast is bread soaked in a beaten egg and milk mixture, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Egg Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg lightly and mix in the salt and milk.

  2. Soak the slices of bread in the custard until soft.

Cook

  1. Heat a griddle and add butter.

  2. Brown each slice on one side, then add butter on top and turn to brown the other side.

  3. Optionally, fry in drippings from ham for added flavor.

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

Egg
Binds the milk to the bread and sets to give the slices a firm, custardy coating.
Milk
Moistens the bread and forms the custard that soaks into it.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and then browns on the griddle to form the toast.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the surface and carries rich flavor to the toast.

The step that matters

Brown each slice on one side, then add butter on top and turn to brown the other side.. Soaked bread is wet and can burn on the outside before the custard sets inside. Moderate heat and butter on both sides promote even golden browning.

“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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