Nun's Toast
This dish goes under several other names.
Take stale slices of bread and trim to the same size. Make a raw custard in the proportion of I beaten egg and a pinch of salt to each ½ pint of milk. Spread the bread on a platter and pour over a part of the custard, basting with more until the bread is thoroughly soaked. Drain slightly then quickly sauté in a little butter in a hot pan. Serve plain or with cinnamon and sugar.
This is French toast under an older name, written for cooks who assumed a heavy skillet and day-old bread. Two things decide the outcome: the egg-to-milk ratio and how hot the pan is when the bread goes in.
- The custard ratioHalf a pint is one cup, so the recipe gives one egg per cup of milk — quite thin by current standards, which produces a soft, milky slice rather than a custardy one. Two eggs per cup gives a firmer set and browns more readily.
- Stale bread is the pointDry, day-old bread absorbs custard without collapsing; fresh sandwich bread turns to paste on the platter. Slices around 3/4 inch thick hold up best, and a low oven for ten minutes will stale fresh bread in a pinch.
- Basting, not dunkingPouring and basting on a platter, as written, soaks the slices evenly and lets you judge saturation. A quick dip in a shallow bowl works too, but give each side long enough that the custard reaches the centre.
- "Quickly sauté in a hot pan"The recipe says hot, but butter browns and burns fast, and the interior needs a minute or two per side to set; medium heat is the safer reading. If the outside is dark before the centre firms, the pan is too hot.
- Butter and scorchingButter alone will blacken across several batches. Wipe the pan between batches and add fresh butter, or cut it with a spoonful of neutral oil to raise the smoke point.
- YieldOne cup of milk and its egg will coat roughly four to six slices, depending on thickness and how dry the bread is — about two servings.
- ServingCinnamon sugar is the frugal finish given here. Warm syrup, jam, or stewed fruit all suit it, and a pinch of nutmeg in the custard would not be out of place.
The phrase "goes under several other names" is doing real work: soaked and fried bread appears as pain perdu (lost bread) in French, as German toast in some American books, and as Poor Knights of Windsor in England, and versions of it are recorded across Europe for centuries. The name Nun's Toast is used loosely in American cookbooks — elsewhere it attaches to a savoury dish of chopped hard-boiled egg and onion in white sauce over toast — which is a reminder that dish names in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books were regional and unstable. Its place in a low-cost collection is straightforward: it is a method for rescuing bread that has gone hard, using an egg and a cup of milk to turn what would otherwise be waste into a hot meal, which is the same logic behind the French name.