“When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over, and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. Toad sat up on end once more, dried his eyes, sipped his tea and munched his toast, and soon began talking freely about himself, and the house he lived in, and his doings there, and how important he was, and what a lot his friends thought of him.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Take twenty eggs, beat them in a dish with some salt and put butter to them; then have two large rouls or fine manchets, cut them into toasts, & toast them against the fire with a pound of fine sweet butter; being finely buttered, lay the toasts in a fair clean scowred dish, put the eggs on the toasts, and garnish the dish with pepper and salt. Otherways, half boil them in the shells, then butter them, and serve them on toasts, or toasts about them. To these eggs sometimes use musk and ambergriece, and no pepper.
Sources: The passage is from Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, beehive stamp.