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Toast in Variety
Toast may be used as a dessert at lunch, and there are a dozen ways in which its plainness may be improved upon. For the children trim all crust from the thin slices and place in the oven until a golden brown all through. Smother it in apple sauce or pour over the heated juice from canned fruits and serve cold with milk or cream.
Dip the cut slices in a raw custard-1 egg to 1/2 pint of milk-and fry quickly with butter; serve hot with butter and spiced sugar-this is variously known as German, French and nun's toast. Cut the slices in circles, sauté quickly in butter; drop on each piece I large spoonful of mashed prunes, and serve with cream, whipped or plain. Stewed figs or any marmalade which is not too rich may also be used.
Five dessert treatments for bread, given in the compressed style of an era when a cook was expected to fill in the blanks. The measurements that matter are the custard ratio and the oven, and both need translating.
- The custard ratioOne egg to half a pint of milk is 1 egg to 1 cup, which is a thin batter by modern standards — the slices will soak fast and stay soft in the middle. If you want a firmer, more set interior, use 2 eggs to the cup and let thick slices sit in it a full minute per side.
- "Golden brown all through"This is oven-dried toast, closer to rusk or zwieback than to toaster toast; the original gives no temperature or time. A low oven — around 300F for 20–30 minutes, turning once — will do it; the point is to dry the crumb entirely so it can take a wet sauce without collapsing.
- Spiced sugarGranulated sugar mixed with cinnamon, and often a little nutmeg, mace or clove. A ratio of 1 tablespoon sugar to 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon is about right for two servings.
- "Fry quickly with butter"Quickly means over medium-high heat in a generously buttered pan — roughly 2 minutes a side. Butter browns and then burns at this heat, so wipe the pan and add fresh butter between batches rather than topping up the old.
- Canned fruit juiceThe syrup from canned peaches, pears or plums. Modern canned fruit is often packed in juice or light syrup rather than the heavier syrup common when this was written, so it will taste thinner; reduce it by half in a small pan if you want it to cling.
- Mashed prunesSimmer pitted prunes in water to cover for 15–20 minutes, then mash to a coarse purée — a lekvar consistency. Ready-made prune butter also works.
- Bread to useSlightly stale white sandwich bread or a plain enriched loaf, cut about 1/2 inch thick. Very fresh bread turns to paste in the custard, and an open-crumbed sourdough lets the custard run straight through.
- YieldTwo slices per person for the fried versions, three or four of the small sautéed circles. All of these want to be assembled and eaten at once; the toast softens within minutes of meeting the sauce.
Egg-dipped fried bread is one of the oldest ways of rescuing a stale loaf, and the names collected here — German, French and nun's toast — are given by the recipe itself as alternatives for the one dish; the French pain perdu, "lost bread", carries the same idea of the loaf that would otherwise have been thrown out. "Nun's toast" is often linked to convent kitchens and thrift, though that association is traditional rather than documented, and in American cookbooks of this period the name just as often meant toast under a milk-and-egg sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg. What is striking about this page is how far dessert is built from what is already in the house — day-old bread, the syrup left in a fruit jar, a spoonful of marmalade, prunes from the winter store.