French toast

French toast

French toast served at a restaurant
Serving temperature	Hot, with toppings
Main ingredients	Bread, eggs, milk or cream

French toast, also known as eggy bread,Bombay toast,German toast,gypsy toast,poor knights (of Windsor), or Spanish toast, is a dish made of bread soaked in milk, then in beaten eggs and then fried, a variation from the traditional spanish dessert called Torrija.

The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 4th or 5th century; the recipe mentions soaking in milk, but not egg, and gives it no special name, just aliter dulcia "another sweet dish".

Under the names suppe dorate, soupys yn dorye, tostées dorées, and payn purdyeu, the dish was widely known in medieval Europe. For example, Martino da Como offers a recipe. French toast was often served with game birds and meats. The word "soup" in these names refers to bread soaked in a liquid, a sop.

The usual French name is pain perdu "lost bread", as it is a way to reclaim stale or otherwise "lost" bread. It may also be called pain doré "golden bread". The term pain perdu was formerly used metaphorically to mean sunk costs.

A fourteenth-century German recipe uses the name Arme Ritter ("poor knights"), a name also used in English and the Nordic languages. Also in the fourteenth century, Taillevent presented a recipe for "tostées dorées".

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.

Slices of bread are soaked or dipped in a mixture of beaten eggs, often with milk or cream. Sometimes sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, or vanilla are added to the mixture. The slices of egg-coated bread are then fried on both sides until they are browned and cooked through. Day-old bread is often recommended by chefs because the stale bread will soak up more egg mixture without falling apart.

The cooked slices may be covered with sugar or sweet toppings such as jam, honey, fruit, or maple syrup, or served as a savory dish with ketchup or another sauce.