Cut slices of stale bread; beat 3 eggs with a pinch of salt and ¼ cup of milk. Dip the slices of bread in the beaten eggs and fry until brown on both sides. Cover with pulverized sugar; sprinkle with cinnamon and some finely chopped nuts. Serve hot.
A very lean set of instructions for what is essentially French toast, German-style, finished as a sweet. The ratio and the finish are what distinguish it, so get those right and the rest follows.
- Pulverized sugarThis is confectioners' (powdered) sugar, not granulated. Sift it over the hot toast so it clings rather than pooling.
- The egg-to-milk ratioThree eggs to ¼ cup milk is deliberately egg-heavy — closer to a thin omelette batter than the milky custard most modern recipes use. Expect a firm, savoury-rich slice that carries the sugar and cinnamon well; don't dilute it.
- No fat is namedFry in butter over medium heat, or a mix of butter and neutral oil so the milk solids don't scorch. High heat browns the outside before the egg sets inside.
- Why stale breadDry bread absorbs the egg without collapsing. Cut slices ½ to ¾ inch thick; if your bread is fresh, leave the slices out uncovered for a few hours or dry them briefly in a 200F oven.
- Dipping time"Dip" means just that — a few seconds a side for the egg-forward batter here. Longer soaking with this little milk gives you a heavy, wet centre.
- The nutsToast and chop them before you start; walnuts or hazelnuts would suit. They go on while the surface is still hot enough to hold them.
- YieldThree eggs and ¼ cup milk will coat roughly six standard slices — two to three servings. Fry in batches and hold finished slices on a rack in a low oven rather than stacking them, which steams the crust soft.
In German this is Arme Ritter, "poor knights" — a name recorded in German cookery well before the nineteenth century and generally explained as a knight's dish made with bread and eggs when better food was out of reach. Nearly every European kitchen has a version of the same economy: soaked stale bread fried in fat, called pain perdu ("lost bread") in France, torrijas in Spain, rabanadas in Portugal. Its appearance here reflects the conceit of the book, which assigns a dish to each day of the year and labels it with a nationality — the neighbouring entries are French pop-overs and Irish potato puffs — so the reader could tour the world from a home kitchen without leaving the breakfast table.