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Egg Toasts
Beat together one egg, one breakfast cupful of milk and a pinch of salt, soak in this six small slices of stale bread, and when soft put them on a well-buttered griddle and brown on both sides. These make a very good dish for tea, served hot. They should be eaten with butter.
French toast under an older name, and with a much thinner custard than modern recipes use. The ratio is the thing to watch.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is usually reckoned at roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read this as about one cup of milk. Tea cups of the period ran smaller, around 6 ounces, so the qualifier matters.
- One egg to a cup of milkThat is a very loose custard by current standards; many modern recipes use two or three eggs per cup. With a single egg the bread absorbs mostly milk and browns pale, so expect a soft interior rather than a set one. Two eggs gives a firmer slice without changing the character of the dish.
- Stale bread is not optionalDry, day-old bread has the structure to take up liquid without collapsing. Fresh sandwich bread will turn to paste in the milk. Cut slices about half an inch thick and, if the loaf is fresh, dry them in a 300F oven for ten minutes first.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350F on an electric griddle, and butter it generously as directed. Too hot and the outside colors before the center warms through; two to three minutes a side is usual.
- Soaking timeThe recipe's guide is "when soft." With a mixture this thin the bread takes up liquid quickly, so a short dip per side is often enough; soak past the point of softness and the slice may not lift out in one piece.
- Yield and servingSix small slices serves two or three. The recipe calls only for butter and mentions no syrup, sugar or spice. A little sugar or preserve on the table is closer to how it would be eaten now.
Bread soaked in egg and milk and fried is one of the oldest ways of using up a stale loaf, recorded in medieval European kitchens long before it acquired the name French toast in English. The plain title Egg Toasts and the note that it makes "a very good dish for tea" place this firmly in the domestic side of Oscar Tschirky's book: alongside the Waldorf's terrapin and canvasback there are dozens of these thrifty, unornamented household dishes. Tea here means the light late-afternoon or early-evening meal of the period, when eggs and bread on a griddle were an ordinary answer to a small hunger rather than a weekend indulgence.