German Toast
One half a loaf of baker's bread cut in medium sized slices and soaked in a custard made by mixing four eggs with one pint of cold milk; let the bread soak one or two hours in the custard, must not be sweetened, then fry the slices on a well buttered griddle until a light brown. Serve with hard sauce or any kind of good sauce.
This is French toast under an older name, with an unusually long soak and no sugar in the batter — the sweetness arrives entirely from the sauce.
- The soak is the hingeOne to two hours suits a firm, sturdy loaf. Modern soft sandwich bread will turn to paste; use a firm day-old bread, cut reasonably thick, and give it 15 to 30 minutes, turning once.
- Pint and proportionsA pint is 2 cups. Four eggs to 2 cups of milk gives a fairly thin custard, enough to coat and penetrate the bread over a long soak.
- Why no sugarThe instruction "must not be sweetened" is explicit. Sugar in the custard would be liable to catch on the griddle, and in any case the sweetness comes from the sauce at table.
- Griddle heatModerate. Too hot and the egg browns while the middle stays liquid; the recipe asks only for a light brown.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring — brandy, vanilla or nutmeg — chilled firm and served in a lump that melts over the hot toast. It is not a cooked sauce.
- Butter the griddle generously"Well buttered" is meant literally, and it will need renewing between batches, since the custard clings and the milk solids darken.
- YieldHalf a loaf in medium slices gives roughly 8 to 10 pieces.
What Americans call French toast has carried a shifting set of national labels — German toast, and in older English books "poor knights of Windsor" — none of which tell you much about origin, since bread soaked in egg and milk and fried is documented across Europe from the medieval period onward and was a way of using up stale loaves. Served with hard sauce, a brandied butter more usually seen on plum pudding, this belongs to the late nineteenth-century habit of finishing a plain supper with something sweet and hot. The specification of "baker's bread" is suggestive of a period when commercially baked loaves were becoming common enough in American households to be worth distinguishing from bread made at home.