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Dessert

Custaed Toast

Custard toast is bread soaked in milk, eggs, sugar, and salt, then fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk 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 ↓

Custaed Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread slices in a mixture of milk, beaten eggs, sugar, and salt until soft.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a pan over medium-high heat.

  2. Fry the soaked bread slices in the hot lard until they are a delicate 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Bind the soaking custard and help set the bread's coating as it fries.
Milk
Soaks into the bread to add moisture and create a soft, custardy interior.
Baker's bread
Absorbs the custard mixture, becoming soft and holding it through frying.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown when fried.

The step that matters

Frying the soaked bread. Sugar in the coating browns quickly, so the heat should be moderate enough to brown the outside while the custard inside cooks through. Too hot and the surface darkens before the center sets.

“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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