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Golden Toast with Raspberries
Cut six slices from a stale loaf of French bread, quarter-inch thick. Place in a bowl two fresh eggs, two tablespoons sugar, a half teaspoon vanilla essence and one gill milk. Sharply mix with whisk two minutes. Dip the slices of bread into this custard, heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add bread and fry three minutes on each side. Lift up, dress on a hot dish and keep hot.
Remove stems from a half pint sound raspberries, place them in a saucepan with two tablespoons sugar, one gill water and a tablespoon kirsch; boil five minutes, then pour raspberries over the toast and serve.
This is pain perdu with a quick raspberry compote. The measurements convert cleanly; the only real decisions are slice thickness and heat.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The recipe uses one gill of milk in the custard and another gill of water in the raspberry syrup.
- Slice thicknessQuarter-inch slices of a narrow French loaf are much thinner than modern French toast, so they soak through in seconds and crisp rather than stay custardy. A brief dip on each side is all they need; a long soak will collapse them.
- Custard quantityTwo eggs, 2 tbsp sugar and half a cup of milk is generous for six thin slices. Whisk it hard enough to break the eggs up completely, or the whites will fry into pale streaks.
- Pan heatThree minutes a side implies moderate heat, not high. Butter alone at high heat will brown and burn before the toast colours evenly; keep it at a steady sizzle and add a fresh knob of butter between batches.
- Frying in batchesSix slices will not fit in one pan without steaming each other. Cook two or three at a time and hold them on a rack in a low oven rather than stacked on a plate, which softens the crust.
- "Remove stems"Cultivated raspberries come off the cane hulled already; this means picking out any leftover caps, leaves and soft fruit. Half a pint is about 6 oz.
- The five-minute boilFive minutes at a full boil with sugar and water will reduce the berries to a loose syrup with the fruit largely broken down. If you want whole berries, simmer the sugar and water first and add the fruit for the last minute.
- KirschA clear cherry brandy, dry rather than sweet. Added before the boil it loses most of its alcohol and leaves a faint kernel bitterness; stir it in off the heat if you want the spirit to read more clearly.
- YieldSix thin slices serves two, or three at a light breakfast. Assemble at the last moment, since the syrup soaks the toast quickly.
Pain perdu, "lost bread," is the standing European answer to a stale loaf: dip it in sweetened egg and milk, fry it in butter, and the bread is recovered. The English name shifts with the century and the country, and "golden toast" reads as an English equivalent of the French pain doré, the usual term in Quebec. The finish here -- a compote boiled to order with sugar, water and a spoonful of kirsch, poured over at the moment of service -- suggests a cook used to plating on demand. Kirsch with raspberries and with cherries was common in turn-of-the-century hotel dessert cookery, where a measure of spirit was a familiar way to lift preserved or out-of-season fruit.