Egg Toast
1 egg 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 4 slices bread Beat the egg thoroughly and add the salt and milk. Have the bread cut in thin slices; dip them in the milk, allowing each to absorb some. Brown in a buttered frying pan or on a griddle; butter and serve hot with sugar and cinnamon or with syrup.
A plain French toast, thinner in custard than most modern versions: one egg to a full cup of milk. A few adjustments make it behave.
- YieldFour slices, serving two at breakfast. The custard is generous enough for six slices if the bread is thin.
- The egg-to-milk ratioOne egg per cup of milk is a lean custard by current standards; many modern recipes use closer to one egg per quarter cup of milk. The lean mix soaks in fast and browns pale, so expect a softer, milkier slice rather than a rich custardy one. Two eggs will give a firmer result without changing the method.
- Bread"Thin slices" would most likely have come from a firmer, closer-crumbed household loaf than modern soft sandwich bread, which disintegrates in a custard this thin; use day-old bread with some body, and dip briefly rather than soaking.
- The hinge: heatMedium heat, not high. Too hot a pan sets the outside before the interior warms through and leaves the middle wet; too cool and the bread absorbs butter and turns greasy. Three to four minutes a side is about right.
- ButterButter alone browns and burns before the second batch is done. Wipe the pan between batches and add fresh butter, or cut it with a spoonful of neutral oil.
- DonenessWith a full cup of milk the slices should be cooked until the centre is set, not merely coloured. Press the middle: it should feel springy rather than soft and wet.
- ServingCinnamon sugar mixed in advance — roughly a tablespoon of sugar to a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon — spreads more evenly than sprinkling each separately.
Bread dipped in egg and milk and fried is one of the oldest ways of using up a stale loaf, recorded in various forms across medieval Europe and appearing in English cookery under names like "pain perdu" (lost bread) and "poor knights." American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried it under a whole range of plain names — egg toast, French toast, Spanish toast — with little consistency between them, which is why it turns up here as "Egg Toast" rather than the name most readers would use today. The recipe's thrift is the point: a single egg, a cup of milk and four slices of bread.