French Toast Day

What the day is

French Toast Day is observed on November 28. The dish is not French, and its real history is considerably more interesting than the name.

Origin and background

Bread soaked in liquid and fried is among the older recorded recipes in Europe. A version appears in the Roman collection attributed to Apicius, where bread is soaked in milk, fried and served with honey. Similar dishes recur throughout medieval European cookery, long before anything resembling a national cuisine existed to attach a name to.

The French name explains the dish better than the English one does. Pain perdu means lost bread, and refers to bread gone stale that would otherwise be wasted. Custard and heat recover it. That is the entire logic of the recipe, and it is why versions of the dish appear independently almost everywhere bread is a staple.

The names elsewhere carry the same idea or a related joke. German has Arme Ritter and the Nordic languages a direct equivalent, both meaning poor knights, a dish for people who could not afford better. Spanish torrijas are eaten in Lent, Portuguese rabanadas at Christmas, and Hong Kong style French toast is deep-fried and served with condensed milk.

The often-repeated story that the dish was named for an innkeeper called Joseph French in colonial Albany, who supposedly mangled the apostrophe in French's toast, has no contemporary source behind it and appears to be a much later invention.

The technique point worth knowing is that stale bread is not a compromise. Dry bread absorbs custard without collapsing, which is precisely why fresh bread makes a worse version of the dish.

How to take part

• Use bread a day or two old, and cut it thick.
• Let it soak properly. Most disappointing French toast was lifted out of the custard too early.
• Cook it slower than feels right, so the center sets before the outside burns.
• Try a version from somewhere else: torrijas, rabanadas, or the Hong Kong style.
• Salt the custard. That omission is what makes the dish taste flat.