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Golden Toast with Apricots
Open a pint can apricots, strain liquor into a saucepan, cut apricots in thin slices, add an ounce sugar to liquor and let reduce on fire to half the quantity. Pour in a tablespoon each maraschino and Swiss kirsch, add apricots, mix well and keep hot. Cut from a loaf stale French bread twelve slices one-third of an inch thick. Mix in a bowl one fresh egg, a tablespoon sugar, two gills milk and six drops vanilla essence. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in a large frying pan, dip the slices of bread in the custard, then lay in pan one beside another and cook for three minutes on each side. Lift up, dress on a dish, pour apricots evenly over them and serve.
A French-toast supper dish written in the clipped hotel style of the period, where quantities are given by weight and by gill and the cook is assumed to know the rest. Nothing here is difficult; the conversions and the pan management are what need attention.
- Gills and ouncesTwo gills of milk is one cup. An ounce of sugar is about two level tablespoons by weight, roughly 28 g.
- The can sizeA pint can of apricots is close to today's 15-16 oz can in syrup; expect about a cup of drained fruit and rather less liquor. Fruit packed in juice rather than syrup may need the full ounce of sugar and a little longer to reduce.
- Reduce before the liqueur goes inThe syrup is reduced by half over heat, and the maraschino and kirsch go in only afterwards. The recipe does not specify taking the pan off the boil; adding spirits at the end rather than the start is generally held to keep more of their aroma.
- Swiss kirschA clear, dry cherry eau-de-vie, not a sweet cordial. Maraschino here means the Italian liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Both can be left out; the sauce is then plainer but sound.
- The custard is leanOne egg, one cup milk and a tablespoon of sugar is a thin dip meant to coat stale bread quickly rather than soak it. Twelve slices will strain it; a second egg is reasonable if the bread drinks more than expected.
- Bread and soakingDay-old French bread cut a third of an inch thick is right. Dip briefly on each side, no more than a few seconds, or the slices collapse in the pan.
- Pan heat and timingThree minutes a side means medium heat, not hot. Two tablespoons of butter will not carry twelve slices; work in batches, adding fresh butter each time, and hold the cooked slices in a 200F oven.
- YieldTwelve slices serves four to six as a dessert or a breakfast dish. Sauce and toast should meet at the table, both hot.
Golden toast is one of the many names the dish now generally called French toast has carried in English kitchens: pain perdu, "lost bread," in France, meaning bread too stale to eat plainly and rescued in egg and milk. Dressed with canned apricots, maraschino and kirsch, it says a good deal about the period. Canned fruit in syrup had become cheap and reliable, and a hotel-trained cook could turn a thrift dish into a restaurant dessert simply by pouring a spirited compote over it. The pairing of apricot with kirsch is often said to be at home in Swiss and Alsatian cooking, where cherry eau-de-vie is the household spirit and stone fruit the household preserve.