French toast
bread soaked in beaten eggs and then fried
French toast is a dish of sliced bread soaked in beaten eggs and often milk or cream, 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, sugar, vanilla, and 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 savoury 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.
Names
This dish occurs in various forms and under different names in many places, but this article calls it "French toast" for convenience.
French
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.
German
An Austrian and Bavarian term is Pofesen because the shape of the dish is reminiscent of medieval knights' shields from the city of Pavia.
Hungarian
In Hungary, it is commonly called bundáskenyér (lit. 'furry bread').
Dutch
In the Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium, it is called wentelteefjes, first used in 1623, from wentel ("turn") + teefjes, diminutive plural of teef ("pastry").
“French toast” enters the record as bread soaked in beaten eggs and then fried. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what French, toast and bread can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “French toast” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.