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Golden Toast with Peaches
Peel six medium, sound peaches, cut from the stones in quarter-inch slices, place in a bowl with an ounce fine sugar, two tablespoons maraschino, tablespoon rum and three tablespoons raspberry syrup, gently mix and let infuse in a cold place till required.
Crack a fresh egg in a bowl, add tablespoon sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence and one and a half gills milk. Sharply beat with whisk one minute. Cut from a stale French loaf six slices quarter-inch thick, soak pieces in the bowl preparation, then heat tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, add the toast, one slice beside another, and nicely fry two minutes on each side. Remove, arrange on a hot dish, place the peaches and liquor on top of the toast and serve.
A French toast dish dressed as dessert. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures are pre-metric trade shorthand and the batter is leaner than a modern cook would expect.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is a quarter of a pint: 5 fl oz imperial, so one and a half gills of milk is about 7 to 7 1/2 fl oz, a little over 3/4 cup (roughly 200 ml). In American measure a gill is 4 fl oz, which would give a flat 3/4 cup. An ounce of fine sugar is roughly two tablespoons of caster sugar; the later "tablespoon sugar" in the custard is a separate, additional amount.
- The batter is deliberately thinOne egg to the better part of a cup of milk gives a loose custard that soaks fast and fries to a thin gold rather than a puffed, eggy slab. If you prefer the richer modern style, use two eggs, but expect a heavier result than intended.
- Quarter-inch slicesBoth peaches and bread are cut thin on purpose. Thicker bread will not saturate in a quick dip and will fry with a dry seam through the middle; a thin, stale slice takes the custard through and crisps at the edges.
- Stale bread mattersFresh crumb collapses in the milk. Day-old baguette, or fresh slices left uncovered for a few hours, holds together through the soak and the turn in the pan.
- MaraschinoThis means maraschino liqueur, a clear cherry-kernel spirit, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. The two are unrelated in flavour and the jar syrup will make the fruit cloyingly sweet.
- Raspberry syrupA sweetened fruit syrup of the sort sold for soda and cordials, not seedless jam. Warmed raspberry preserve thinned with a little water is the nearest substitute.
- A black frying panCast iron or a well-seasoned steel pan. It matters mainly for even heat: one tablespoon of butter across six slices is very little fat, so the pan needs to be hot and evenly so, and you will likely add more butter between batches.
- The macerationThe recipe says only to let the peaches infuse in a cold place till required; time in the cold lets the sugar draw out juice and the spirits thin it into a syrup. Peel them easily by scoring the base and dropping them into boiling water for thirty seconds.
- YieldSix slices, so three modest dessert portions or six small ones. Fry to order and serve at once; the toast softens within minutes under the fruit.
Golden toast is the same idea as pain perdu, "lost bread" — stale bread reclaimed by soaking it in sweetened egg and milk and frying it, a practice recorded in European kitchens for centuries before it acquired the name French toast in English. What distinguishes this version is the restaurant treatment of the fruit: peaches macerated in maraschino, rum and raspberry syrup belong to the same repertoire as peach Melba and the other fruit-and-liqueur compositions that filled dessert menus in grand hotels and dining rooms around the turn of the twentieth century. The technique is thrift-kitchen in origin, the garnish purely à la carte.