French toast is a dish made of sliced bread soaked in beaten eggs and typically milk, then pan fried. Alternative names and variants include “eggy bread”, “Bombay toast”, “gypsy toast”, and “poor knights” (of Windsor).
When French toast is served as a sweet dish, milk, sugar, vanilla or cinnamon are also commonly added before pan-frying, and then it may be topped with sugar (often powdered sugar), butter, fruit, or syrup. When it is a savory dish, it is generally fried with a pinch of salt or pepper, and it can then be served with a sauce such as ketchup or mayonnaise.
The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 1st century CE, where it is described as simply aliter dulcia ‘another sweet dish’. The recipe says to “Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve”.
A 14th-century German recipe uses the name Arme Ritter ‘poor knights’, a name also used in English and the Nordic languages. Also in the 14th-century, Taillevent presented a recipe for “tostées dorées”. Italian 15th-century culinary expert Martino da Como offers a recipe.
The usual French name is pain perdu (French: [pɛ̃ pɛʁdy] ‘lost bread’, reflecting its use of stale or otherwise “lost” bread. It may also be called pain doré ‘golden bread’ in Canada. There are fifteenth-century English recipes for pain perdu.
An Austrian and Bavarian term is pafese or pofese, from zuppa pavese, referring to Pavia, Italy. The word “soup” in the dish’s name refers to bread soaked in a liquid, a sop. In Hungary, it is commonly called bundáskenyér (lit. “coated bread”).
In Ottoman cuisine, a dish of bread soaked in eggs with honey but no milk is called fāvniyye.
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