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Egg Toast

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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, then mix in the salt and milk.

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

Cook the toast

  1. Heat a griddle, then add butter.

  2. Brown each slice on one side.

  3. Add butter on top.

  4. Turn to brown the other side.

  5. Optionally, fry the toast 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 helps the slices set and hold together when cooked.
Milk
Adds moisture to the custard so the bread softens and cooks through without drying out.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and browns on the griddle, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Conducts heat to the griddle and browns the bread surface, adding rich flavor.

The step that matters

Soak the bread until soft. Bread that is only briefly dipped stays dry in the centre and browns unevenly. Enough soaking lets the custard penetrate the crumb, so the slice cooks through evenly and the egg sets within it.

“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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