Pain Perdu
12 ounces of flour. 1 pint of milk. 2 ounces of butter melted. 2 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of golden syrup. 25 slices of bread--French rolls best. Mix the flour and milk to make a thin batter and add the other ingredients. Let the bread slices steep a minute or two in it, then fry them in hot lard. They should be barely masked over with batter, not thickly covered like fritters. May be sauteed in frying pans as well. Serve with syrup, sauce, or jelly.
This is French toast made the batter-dipped way rather than the custard-soaked way, and the whole character of the dish depends on keeping the coating thin. A few conversions and one questionable ratio are worth sorting out before you start.
- The batter is too thick as writtenTwelve ounces of flour (about 2¾ cups) to one pint of milk gives a heavy pancake batter, not the thin veil the recipe calls for. Thin it with additional milk until it runs off the spoon in a stream and only faintly coats the bread; the instruction to have the slices "barely masked over" is the real specification, not the flour weight.
- Golden syrupAn invert cane syrup, still sold under the Lyle's name and now widely stocked. Light corn syrup is the closest substitute; honey or maple will work but push the flavour elsewhere. Its job here is browning and a trace of sweetness, so one tablespoon in the whole batch is not a place to fuss.
- Bread"French rolls" here means a small crusty white roll, sliced across. Stale bread behaves better than fresh, whose crumb collapses into the batter. Cut slices about half an inch thick.
- Steeping timeA minute or two is generous for thin slices of stale roll. Dip, turn, lift, and let the excess drain off the corner; the bread should be damp through, not saturated, or it will steam inside the crust.
- Frying fat and temperature"Hot lard" is not specified, but the usual frying range of about 350-375F suits it. Below that the batter drinks fat and goes greasy; much above it and the coating colours before the interior warms. Lard fries clean and neutral, but any high-smoke-point fat works. The sauté-pan option is shallow frying in a little fat, turning once.
- YieldTwenty-five slices is a bakery or boarding-house quantity, serving eight to twelve at breakfast. The batter scales down evenly; a quarter batch handles six or seven slices.
- Holding and servingDrain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp, and hold in a 200F oven while you fry the rest. Syrup, a fruit sauce or jelly are all in period; a dusting of sugar and cinnamon is equally at home.
Pain perdu is literally "lost bread" — bread gone stale past eating, reclaimed by soaking and frying. Versions of the idea run back through medieval European cookery and appear in English books as "poor knights" or "pain perdue" long before this one, and the same thrift produced Louisiana's pain perdu and the American breakfast dish now called French toast. What marks this particular version is the batter: instead of dipping bread in beaten egg and milk, the cook makes a thin flour batter and treats the slices almost as fritters, and the yield of twenty-five slices suggests cooking for numbers. The stern warning against a thick coating suggests someone who knows exactly how a heavy batter behaves when the pan is busy and the fat is dropping in temperature.