Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cream Toasts
Cream Toasts
Cut a pound of French roll into slices as thick as a finger, and lay them in a dish. Pour over them half a pint of cream, and a quarter of a pint of milk, and sprinkle some crushed lump sugar and cinnamon on their surface. When the pieces of bread are soaked in the cream, remove them, dip the slices in some raw eggs, and fry them brown in butter. Time, ten minutes to fry. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian version of what most cooks now call French toast, richer than the modern breakfast standard because the soaking is done in cream rather than in the egg. Two things decide the result: how far the bread is allowed to soak, and how gently it fries.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of cream is about 1 1/4 cups and a quarter pint of milk about 2/3 cup. The recipe gives no slice count; a pound of roll cut finger-thick will give perhaps eight or so pieces.
- A French rollNot a baguette in the modern sense but a soft, light white roll or small loaf with a fine crumb. A brioche loaf or a good white sandwich loaf, a day old, behaves the same way; very open sourdough will fall apart.
- Lump sugarLoaf sugar broken and crushed with a rolling pin. Granulated or caster sugar is the direct substitute, about 2 tablespoons with a teaspoon of ground cinnamon.
- The soak is the hingeThe bread must take up the cream without collapsing; the recipe gives no time, only 'when the pieces of bread are soaked'. Press a slice and it should feel heavy and yielding but still lift in one piece. Fresh bread soaks too fast and turns to paste.
- The egg dipBeat two or three eggs with a pinch of salt and dip, not soak. The egg is a coating that sets on the outside and holds the cream-laden crumb together in the pan.
- FryingButter over medium heat, not high, and expect three to four minutes a side. The book gives ten minutes to fry without saying whether that is per slice or for the panful; hotter and faster will brown the egg before the inside is set.
- YieldFour or five as the book says, which is generous by modern portions; two slices each is plenty. Serve at once with more sugar and cinnamon, or with a preserve.
Bread soaked in milk and eggs and fried is one of the oldest ways of using up a stale loaf, recorded in medieval European kitchens under names like pain perdu, "lost bread", and in English cookery as pain-perdy or poor knights of Windsor. The version here belongs to the later, richer end of that tradition: by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and 80s a middle-class household could take half a pint of cream for a dish once meant to rescue bread from the bin. The costing in shillings and pence, given for nearly every entry in the Dictionary, was a selling point for readers running a kitchen on a fixed weekly allowance.