Home › Doughnuts and Crullers › Mennonite Toast
Mennonite Toast
3 eggs 1 pint sweet milk Pinch of salt.
Beat eggs well, and add sweet milk and salt. Cut slices 1 inch thick from a loaf of bread made with Five Roses flour.
Remove crust. Dip slices into the egg and milk. fry like doughnuts in hot lard or dripping till a delicate brown. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve hot.
DAINTY, disappearing doughnuts; light, digestible crullers and fried things-how quickly Five Roses accustoms one to quality. It has the knack of producing just the right kind of dough that tastes like nuts, that bobs deliciously in the rich, deep fat. And yet Five Roses is the sturdy, glutinous flour that resists fat absorption, taking barely enough to brown becomingly, to crisp quickly without greasiness, heaviness or sogginess. Never an outraged stomach with Five Roses doughnuts and crullers. Golden to the hungry eye, tooth-teasing, ablebodied nuts of dough that improve with age when carefully concealed from busy little milk teeth.
Deep-fried French toast, essentially — the batter is a plain custard and the frying is done in the same kettle of fat used for the doughnuts in this chapter. A few conversions and one temperature will get you there.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsweetened milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, both of which were kept for baking. Whole milk is closest to what was meant.
- A pintAbout two cups by the American measure, though a Canadian imperial pint would be nearer two and a half. With three eggs it gives a thin custard, enough for something like eight to ten thick slices.
- Fat temperatureThe original just says hot. Deep fat for this should sit at 365-375F; below that the bread drinks fat and goes heavy, above it the egg coating scorches before the centre heats through.
- BreadA close-crumbed white loaf a day or two old holds up far better than fresh bread, which collapses in the custard. Inch-thick slices with the crust cut away, as directed.
- SoakingA quick dip is what is intended — a few seconds a side. A long soak saturates the slice and it will break apart when it hits the fat.
- Lard or drippingBoth work and both carry flavour. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes directly; the fat should be deep enough for the slices to float rather than sit on the bottom.
- Draining and sugaringDrain briefly on paper, then dust with powdered (icing) sugar while still hot so it clings. This version calls for sugar only; no cinnamon or syrup is mentioned.
- YieldNo yield is given; the batter will coat roughly eight thick slices, so about four servings at two slices each.
Fried bread soaked in egg and milk is one of the oldest ways of using up a stale loaf, appearing across Europe under names that mostly translate as "poor knights" or "lost bread." The Mennonite attribution here reflects the German-speaking farming communities of southern Manitoba and Ontario whose cooking fed into the prairie recipe books of the period — the Five Roses collection was assembled from contributions sent in by Canadian housewives. What sets this version apart from a griddle-cooked French toast is the instruction to fry it like doughnuts: it goes into deep fat, not a pan. The block of prose following the recipe is advertising copy from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, which published the book to sell Five Roses flour; the claim that a strong flour "resists fat absorption" is salesmanship, though a well-developed gluten structure does help a dough hold its shape in the kettle.