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Egg Toast (for Breakfast or Supper)
4 eggs ½ pint milk 3 tablespoons Five Roses flour Pinch of salt.
Mix the flour in just a little milk so as not to get lumpy. Add salt. Cut the bread in quarter slices and dip in above mixture. Have pan hot, put in butter and let melt until it turns a little brown.
Put in bread and fry a golden brown.
Turn over and brown. Good for supper instead of potatoes. Use stale bread.
A frying-pan supper dish that uses up stale bread and, despite the name, no eggs at all — the coating is nothing but flour, milk and salt.
- The missing eggThe title promises eggs but the batter contains none; whether the egg was omitted in printing or the name was simply used loosely for fried dipped bread cannot be settled from the page. Expect a thinner, crisper crust than eggy French toast, and a batter that will not set as firmly — keep the coating thin or it turns pasty.
- ½ pint of milkFive Roses was a Canadian mill, so imperial measure is likely: ½ imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. A US half-pint cup will also work; the batter should be the consistency of thin cream, so adjust with a splash more milk if the flour tightens it.
- "Quarter slices"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means slices about a quarter of an inch thick, though cutting each slice into quarters is a possible reading. Quarter-inch slices behave best — thicker bread soaks unevenly and goes soggy in the middle.
- Mixing orderThe instruction to slake the flour in a little milk first is the hinge of the recipe. Whisk the flour with two or three tablespoons of milk to a smooth paste, then thin with the rest; dumping the flour into the full quantity guarantees lumps that fry into dry specks.
- Stale bread, deliberatelyDay-old or older bread is not a compromise here. Fresh crumb absorbs the thin batter and collapses; dry bread takes a quick dip and holds its shape in the pan.
- Browning the butterLetting the butter colour before the bread goes in is what supplies most of the flavour, but butter browns fast and then burns. Medium heat, and wipe the pan and add fresh butter between batches or the residue will blacken.
- YieldThe batter coats roughly eight to ten quarter-inch slices — two to three servings. Serve straight from the pan; it softens as it stands.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and it drew heavily on recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why a dish this frugal sits alongside more ambitious baking. Battered fried bread belongs to the same broad family as pain perdu and English poor knights, all of them ways of reviving loaf ends before they were wasted, and versions without egg turn up wherever eggs were scarcer or dearer than flour. The closing note, "good for supper instead of potatoes," places it precisely: this is a starch to fill out the evening meal in a household counting its pennies, not a sweet breakfast.