French Toast
Boil one pint of milk; sweeten, then cut some pieces of bread, about three inches long, two wide and half an inch thick; drop them in quickly, then take them out before they break. Have ready two well beaten eggs with the addition of two tablespoonfuls of water, cover both sides with this, roll them lightly in fine bread crumbs and fry in hot lard a light brown; after this is done sift cinnamon and sugar over them. They are very nice either for dessert or supper.
This is a crumbed, deep-fried French toast closer to a fritter than to the griddle version most people know. The sequence — hot sweet milk, then egg wash, then crumbs — is the whole point, and it is easy to get wrong.
- The hinge: a fast dipThe bread goes into boiling sweetened milk and comes straight out, "before they break." A second or two per side is enough; a soaked slice will collapse in the fat and the crumb coating will slide off.
- BreadUse a firm, close-crumbed white loaf, a day or two old, cut to the size given: roughly 3 x 2 inches and 1/2 inch thick. Soft modern sandwich bread disintegrates in hot milk almost instantly.
- A pint of milkAn American pint is 2 cups. Sweeten to taste — about 2 tablespoons of sugar suits the dish, which gets a further dusting at the end.
- Egg and crumbTwo eggs beaten with 2 tablespoons of water make a thin wash that clings without setting into an omelette. "Fine bread crumbs" means dry crumbs, not fresh; panko is coarser than intended but works.
- Frying in lardDeep or shallow fry at 350-365F. Lard gives the cleanest flavour, and any neutral frying fat substitutes directly. Below 340F the crumbs absorb fat and go greasy.
- Draining and finishingDrain on paper or a rack, then sift cinnamon and sugar over while still hot so it adheres. About 1 teaspoon cinnamon to 1/4 cup sugar.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of milk and two eggs will coat perhaps a dozen pieces of the size specified, enough for about four servings as dessert. They are best eaten within a few minutes; the crust softens as they cool.
Despite the name, the technique is older and broader than France: soaking bread in milk or wine and egg, then frying it, appears across medieval and early modern Europe under names like pain perdu ("lost bread"), suppe dorate and, in English cookbooks, "poor knights" — some of them ways of rescuing a stale loaf, though others were rich, sweetened dishes made with good bread rather than salvage cookery. What distinguishes this version is the crumb coating and the deep fat, which push it out of the breakfast griddle tradition and into the category of fried sweet fritters that Victorian and Edwardian household books served as a plain dessert. The closing line, "very nice either for dessert or supper," reflects a period when supper was a light evening meal distinct from dinner, and a dish of hot fried bread with cinnamon sugar was an entirely respectable thing to put on the table for it.