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Toast Pudding
Cut five or six slices of light, stale bread half an inch thick. Mix one beaten egg with one cup milk, add one-fourth teaspoonful salt, and soak bread in this for fifteen minutes. Brown in hot butter in a frying-pan or griddle. Serve with raisin sauce.
This is French toast under another name, and the proportions are sound: one egg to one cup of milk soaks five or six thick slices without leaving them heavy.
- Which bread"Light, stale bread" means an ordinary white loaf a day or two old, not a dense sourdough or a rye. Stale bread absorbs custard without collapsing; fresh bread turns to paste in the soak.
- Fifteen minutes is deliberateThat is a long soak by modern habit, but with half-inch slices it is what carries the custard to the middle. If your bread is softer or thinner, cut the time to two or three minutes a side and press gently rather than let it sit.
- The hinge: pan heatButter over medium heat, not high. Too hot and the butter browns black before the egg inside sets; too cool and the slices soak up fat and go greasy. Add fresh butter between batches.
- Griddle optionA griddle or heavy skillet holds temperature better than a thin pan and lets you cook all the slices at once. The recipe gives no temperature; judge it by the butter, which should foam and colour slowly rather than smoke.
- Raisin sauceThe recipe as printed gives no formula for it; if the book has one, it is elsewhere. A raisin sauce of this period is typically raisins simmered in water with sugar, thickened lightly with cornstarch or flour, sometimes with lemon or a little butter stirred in at the end. Maple syrup or a warm jam thinned with water does the same job.
- SeasoningThere is no sugar, vanilla or spice in the custard; the sweetness comes from the sauce. A pinch of cinnamon or nutmeg in the milk is a reasonable liberty if you are serving it plain.
- YieldFive or six slices serves two or three at breakfast. Keep finished slices on a rack in a low oven rather than stacked on a plate, where steam softens the crust.
Soaking stale bread in egg and milk and frying it is one of the oldest documented ways of rescuing a loaf — comparable dishes appear in Roman and medieval sources, long before the name "French toast" attached to it in English. Calling it a "pudding" here reflects an older and looser use of the word, which covered a wide range of dishes, including bread, egg and milk cooked together, whether baked, boiled or fried. Household writing on domestic economy and the use of scraps was a large genre in America and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and throwing out bread was treated as a small moral failure. The raisin sauce fits that setting — dried fruit was cheap, kept well, and turned a thrift dish into something that could be set on the table without apology.