Bake this recipe October 5-13, 2024 to participate in the fifth annual Great Rare Books Bakeoff! (More information at the end of the post.)

 

It is always a thrill to take a look at a receipt book that I have never seen before. About a year ago, I sat down with Mistress Anna Campbell’s early eighteenth-century Scottish recipe book in the reading room at Penn State Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections. On the title page, Campbell provides her manuscript with a title — “Her Paistrie Booke” — and date — 1707. In my notes from my first encounter with the manuscript I wrote that, as promised, Campbell’s book is a deep exploration into pastry and baking.

As the library catalog notes, Campbell’s manuscript contains around 400 recipes and almost all of them are written in her lovely handwriting. She loosely organized her recipe book and gathered recipes for pies, pastries, cakes, tarts, custards, meat and various sauces, sweet and savory puddings, dairy, biscuits, and fruit preparations. After that brief encounter, the manuscript made its way to the conservation and digitization teams so it could be safely and completely imaged for our growing Historical Recipe Books Collection and I turned my attention to other recipe books (like Christian Barclay’s manuscript that I wrote about here and this one at the British Library). You can access the catalog description and the complete digitized manuscript here.

When it came time to gather new recipes for this year’s Bake Off, I was delighted when Christina Riehman-Murphy pointed out that Campbell’s recipe book contained a recipe for “French Tosts.”

The Recipe

French Tosts
Cutt prettie thick tosts of whyt bread, tost them befor
the fyre broun, steep them in sweett Cream, or whyte
wine, sugar, and orange Juice, soak them on Coalls in a clean
dish between two dishes

The original recipe is both easy and confusing. It asks you to toast bread, soak it in cream, sugar, and orange juice, and cook the soaked toast in a lidded cooking vessel over a brazier filled with hot coals from the hearth. As I have learned from my research and from hands-on cooking at Pottsgrove Manor last year, this  cooking method was commonly used for pancakes, fritters, and fragile fruit preserves. If you find yourself camping or grilling over charcoal, you, too, could toast your bread over a fire or grill and set your soaked toast to steam in a covered cast iron pan.

The simple bread and dairy ingredients in this recipe (and the recipe for eggy “Other Tosts” that Campbell includes below it in her manuscript) brought me back to the last time I made a historical French toast. Taken together, these three toast recipes start with abundant (likely day-old) bread, eggs, and cream, and are enhanced with flavors from imported sugar, spices, wine, and oranges.  As Campbell’s original “French Tosts” recipe states, you can also swap out the cream for white wine. I should also acknowledge the ambiguity of the punctuation here. An alternate, and valid, reading of the two versions of Campbell’s recipe could be — one version with cream only and a second version with white wine, sugar, and orange juice. I can say, however, that the cream, sugar, and orange in the version that I prepared created a distinctly delicious caramel flavor.

I used pre-sliced “White Sourdough Bread” from the bakery section of my local chain grocery store to test this recipe. The bread does not have sugar or sweetener in it. I believe that this recipe will work wonderfully with a range of store-bought or homemade breads. I think it would also work well with a gluten-free bread. If you try any bread that turns out especially well, leave a comment!

Updated Recipe

Serves 2 (easy to scale up!)

4 slices white bread
1 cup (250ml) cream
¼ cup (50g) sugar
¼ cup (62.5ml) orange juice
Butter or oil for greasing your cooking pan

Equipment: toaster, skillet or frying pan with a lid

Slice the bread into pieces that will fit in your toaster or select 4 slices from a pre-sliced loaf. Toast the bread until lightly browned. Adjust the settings of your toaster or toaster oven, or the placement of your toast, to ensure even, light browning. Arrange the toast in a large, shallow baking dish for seasoning.

Stir together the cream and sugar until the sugar mostly dissolves. Stir in the orange juice.

Pour the cream mix over the prepared toast. Use a spatula to spread the mixture. Make sure that  the top of each slice is coated with a layer of the cream mix. Set aside to rest for 5 minutes.

Flip the slices of toast. Use a spatula to spread the cream mixture over the second side of each toast. Set aside to rest for 5 minutes.

While the toast is absorbing the cream mixture, set a large frying pan or skillet over a medium heat. Add butter or oil as necessary to grease the cooking surface.

Place two slices of toast in your cooking pan, cover with the lid, and cook for approximately 3 minutes. Remove the lid, flip the toast with a spatula, cover again, and cook the second side for 3 minutes. Repeat these instructions to cook the second batch. You may need to adjust the heat levels and cooking times depending on your pan, your stove, and your bread. If your cooking pan fits more than two slices at a time, feel free to cook more slices simultaneously. My lid allowed some steam to escape so you may want to set your lid askew if slices are not crisping up.

Serve the French Tosts immediately.

The Results

The French Tosts taste like toasty malted milk and caramelized sugar with a hint of orange. Crispy on the edges and soft in the middle, this dish is a delight to eat. I suggest you try this recipe out on a lazy weekend morning and enjoy the warm, sweet smells that will envelop your kitchen.

Although I did dress some of my French toast up with honey and fresh fruit, those bold flavors overpowered the subtle malt and caramel that I so enjoyed in my first bites. I suggest that you hold back on adding any syrup, honey, yogurt, or fruit toppings until after you’ve taken a few bites.

The Bake Off

Today I’m also inviting you to mark your calendars for the fifth annual The Great Rare Books Bake Off! This virtual baking competition is a friendly contest between the sister libraries of Penn State University and Monash University. There are so many intriguing recipes to try from our library collections and you can learn so much by baking a recipe instead of just reading it! An engraved pie pan trophy will be awarded to the library that receives the most social media posts featuring photos of your baked goods tagged with its hashtag: #BakePennState or #BakeMonash. If you don’t use social media, you can submit your entry via this form. The competition runs October 5-13, 2024 so you have lots of time to read the recipes, shop for ingredients, and get baking. All the details are on the site linked above.

If this recipe for “French Tosts” is not inspiring you to participate, there are a lot of other recipes to choose from. In past years I’ve also updated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipes from PSU’s collections for delectable sugar bisket, satisfying doughnuts, playful almond jumballs, a delicious lemon tart, and a tasty chocolate cream. I’m also fond of some of the other recipes that we’ve featured, such as PSU’s feather-light Suffrage Angel Cake and gooey Ogontz Cinnamon Buns and Monash’s decadent Pavlova and festive Lamington Cake.