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French Toast, or Maybe It's German
Lay hard bread slices (or split very stale biscuits or rolls) in slightly salted cold milk for a few moments, to moisten. They positively must not be wet. Then dip in beaten egg and fry brown on both sides-good fried in ham fat and served with fried ham, or fried in bacon fat and eaten with any meat gravy. (This is called German Toast in some sections, and, as a matter of fact, we've never been able to find out if there is any difference except in name.) If bread is not so stale, make the following batter: I EGG, SLIGHTLY BEATEN 1/2 CUP MILK 1/4 TEASPOON SALT Mix together, dip both sides of bread into batter very quickly. Fry and eat it with just the same relish whether you call it French or German.
If you want it for dessert, sweeten the milk by adding 1 tablespoon sugar to each cup, and eat it with powdered sugar and lemon juice, or with syrup, marmalade, jelly or jam or with any sweet pudding sauce, applesauce, fried apples or stewed fruit.
A camp-cook's version of a dish most people now make with soft supermarket bread, which is exactly the bread it is not designed for. The whole method turns on how dry the bread is to begin with.
- The hinge: moisten, don't soakHard bread wants only a few seconds in cold milk, long enough to take the brittleness out of the crumb. Bread that goes limp will fall apart in the pan and steam rather than brown.
- Which breadThis assumes a firm, dry, close-grained loaf, or the very stale biscuits and rolls the recipe names. Sliced sandwich bread is already soft; the recipe's own answer for bread that is not so stale is the egg-and-milk batter, dipped very quickly, cut thick if you can.
- Batter ratioOne egg to half a cup of milk with a pinch of salt coats roughly four to six slices. Scale it by keeping the same one-egg-to-half-cup proportion; more milk gives a wetter, more custardy result that needs a slower pan.
- Fat and heatHam or bacon fat gives the browning and the flavour the savoury version depends on. The recipe gives no temperature: medium heat in a heavy skillet, hot enough that the egg sets on contact, cool enough that the centre warms through before the outside darkens.
- Salt in the milkThe salted milk is doing real work, seasoning the bread itself rather than just the coating. Keep it even for the sweet version, where a tablespoon of sugar per cup of milk is added on top of, not instead of, the salt.
- Sweet versionSugar in the batter browns faster, so drop the heat slightly and watch it more closely than the savoury version.
- ServingIt does not hold; cook it in batches and eat as it comes off the pan.