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French Toast
Mrs. M. J. Savage.
To one egg thoroughly beaten, put one cup of sweet milk and a little salt. Slice light bread, and dip into the mixture, allowing each slice to absorb some of the milk; then brown on a hot buttered griddle; spread with butter and serve hot.
A very plain nineteenth-century French toast: one egg to a cup of milk, no sugar, no spice, cooked on a griddle rather than in a skillet of butter. A few notes on the proportions and the bread.
- Sweet milk"Sweet" milk simply means fresh, unsoured — ordinary whole milk. It is specified because sour milk and buttermilk were equally common in the pantry and were used in their own recipes for their reaction with saleratus.
- Light breadLight bread is plain yeast-risen white loaf, as distinct from quick breads and corn bread. Bread a day or two old holds up far better than fresh; a soft modern sandwich loaf will fall apart in the custard.
- The proportion is thinOne egg to a full cup of milk gives a loose custard by current standards, closer to a soak than a coating. Two or three eggs per cup is the usual ratio now; the original will taste milky and set less firmly.
- Dipping, not soakingThe instruction to allow each slice to absorb some of the milk is the hinge. Give each side a few seconds — long enough for the crumb to take up liquid, short enough that the centre still has structure. Sodden slices will not brown, they steam.
- Griddle heatMedium, around 350F on an electric griddle. Too hot and the outside colours before the egg inside sets; too cool and the bread absorbs butter without crusting. Re-butter between batches.
- No sugar in the batterThere is none; unsweetened egg-and-milk dips are the norm in recipes of this period. Sweetness came at the table from butter, sugar, syrup or preserves. Sugar the finished slices if you want them sweet.
- YieldOne cup of milk and one egg will coat roughly four to six slices, enough for two people. Scale by the egg-and-cup unit.
French toast long predates the name, and cooks in the medieval and early modern period made versions of eggy fried bread under titles like pain perdu — "lost bread" — traditionally explained as a way of using a loaf too stale to slice for the table. By the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s, the dish was a familiar American breakfast use for yesterday's loaf. The book itself was a community cookbook, its receipts contributed and signed by named local women — Mrs. M. J. Savage here — and sold to raise money for charity, a format that spread widely through American towns in the second half of the century. Griddling rather than pan-frying suits the kitchen of the period: a large flat iron surface over a wood or coal range would already be hot for other griddle work.