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Breakfast Toast
Add to one-half pint of sweet milk two table-spoons sugar, a little salt and a well-beaten egg; dip in this slices of bread (if dry , let it soak a minute), and fry on a buttered griddle until it is a light brown on each side. This is a good way to use dry bread.- Mrs. Dr. Morey,
A plain nineteenth-century French toast, written for a griddle over a wood range. The proportions are sound; only the units and a few unstated details need translating.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk, as opposed to soured milk or buttermilk. Whole milk gives the best result; skim makes a thin custard that soaks in without setting.
- One egg to a cup of milkThis is a lean custard by modern standards, where two to three eggs per cup is common. It suits dry, close-grained bread, which absorbs freely; with a soft fresh loaf the slices will go limp before they set.
- Dry bread is the pointDry bread suits this well -- Stale bread holds up better here, and the closing line shows thrift was the motive. Slices cut fairly thick hold the custard without collapsing. The instruction to soak a minute applies to genuinely dry bread; fresh bread wants only a quick dip on each side.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350F on an electric griddle. Too hot and the outside browns before the egg in the centre is cooked; too cool and the slices absorb butter and turn greasy.
- Butter the griddle, not the batterRe-butter between batches. Butter burns at griddle heat, so wipe the surface clean if it darkens rather than letting scorched solids transfer to the next round.
- Sugar in the custardTwo tablespoons to a cup of milk is enough to encourage browning. It also means the slices catch quickly, which is another reason to keep the heat moderate.
- YieldRoughly enough custard for six to eight slices of ordinary sandwich bread, serving three or four. The recipe gives no serving suggestion; syrup, honey, or sugar and cinnamon are the usual accompaniments.
Egg-and-milk-soaked fried bread is one of the oldest ways of rescuing a stale loaf, recorded in European cookery for centuries under a range of names, and American nineteenth-century books print it variously as French toast, German toast, egg toast, and, as here, simply breakfast toast. The frank closing line, "This is a good way to use dry bread," is characteristic of The Dixie Cook-Book and of the household manuals of its era, when bread was often baked at home in large batches and going stale would have been, one imagines, more nearly a scheduled event than an accident. The attribution to Mrs. Dr. Morey is also typical: the book appears to have been assembled from contributions by named subscribers, and the honorific borrowed from a husband's profession is generally said to have been a common way such women were credited in print.