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Fried Bread
Cut dry bread into slices, dip it in water, and fry in hot lard or gravy, and butter. Fry until nicely browned, then pour cream and eggs well beaten over it.
Let it fry to the bread and serve hot.
A thrift dish for stale bread, closer to savoury French toast than to a sweet breakfast one. The original gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- The hinge: don't soak, just wetDry bread dipped in water and fried immediately holds together; bread left to sit in water collapses in the pan. A one-second dip on each side of a thick slice is enough.
- BreadStale, firm white bread cut about 3/4 inch thick. Modern sandwich bread is too soft and too thinly sliced to survive the dipping — use a day-old country or sourdough loaf.
- FatLard gives the cleanest fry; "gravy" here most likely means saved meat drippings, for which bacon fat is a close modern substitute. Butter alone will brown too fast, so use it with one of the others rather than on its own.
- Quantities for the custardFor four slices, reckon 2 eggs beaten with about 1/2 cup cream. The original leaves this entirely to judgement.
- HeatMedium; a moderate frying heat rather than a fierce one. The bread should brown in two or three minutes a side; hotter than that and the egg poured on afterwards scorches before it sets.
- "Let it fry to the bread"Once the egg and cream go in, keep the pan moving and cook only until the custard is set and no longer glossy — a minute or two. Eggs held on the heat past that point turn dry and squeaky.
- SeasoningNone is specified. Salt and pepper in the egg mixture; a little sugar and cinnamon if you want it as a breakfast dish.
- YieldTwo slices per person as a side, three or four as a meal. Serve straight from the pan; it does not hold.
Fried bread in one form or another appears in European cookery for centuries under names that all point to the same thrift — pain perdu, "lost bread", the loaf saved from being thrown out, and the German and English poor knights. What distinguishes this version is that the egg and cream go on after frying rather than before, which lets the slice crisp in the fat first and produces something closer to a bread-and-egg scramble than to a soaked custard toast. Its appearance among sauces, pickles and condiments in a book of this kind says less about the dish than about the loose editorial hand common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American compilations. Dishes built on stale bread and drippings were still everyday economy in kitchens of the period, where a loaf was baked or bought whole and nothing was expected to be wasted.