Pain Perdu, Creole Lost Bread (Picayune 1916)

You have a whole French toast project built on the custard — French Toast, The Custard Test is a four-arm experiment on whole milk versus evaporated versus cream. So here is a version with no dairy in it whatsoever.

Five eggs, half a cup of sugar, two tablespoonfuls of orange flower water, the grated zest of a lemon, and three tablespoonfuls of brandy if you want it. Stale bread soaked in that for half an hour and fried in boiling lard. No milk, no cream, no vanilla.

And the book is not being careless — it is being precise. Two pages that touch each other carry three different soaked-bread dishes and it keeps them apart: Cream or Milk Toast (toast the bread first, then pour hot milk over it), Spanish Toast (one egg, a cup of milk, rum or brandy, cinnamon and nutmeg — essentially the French toast you already know), and this one. The dish most people would call French toast is in this book under Spanish Toast. The thing called Pain Perdu is a custard-less egg batter perfumed with orange flower water.

The diagnostic detail: orange flower water and lemon zest, not vanilla and cinnamon. It tastes like a French pastry, not an American breakfast.

UNTESTED.

Ingredients

• 5 eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons orange flower water

The finely grated zest of 1 lemon

• 3 tablespoons brandy (if desired)
• Slices of stale bread, crusts removed, cut into slices, rounds or diamonds
• Lard, for frying
• TO FINISH
• Powdered sugar
• Grated nutmeg, if desired
• NOT IN THIS RECIPE
• No milk. No cream. No vanilla. No cinnamon.

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Cinnamon

1. Beat the eggs until very light. This matters more here than in a dairy custard — the eggs are the entire liquid, so the air you beat in is what keeps the batter from setting like an omelette on the bread.
2. Add the orange flower water and the brandy, then the sugar, and beat thoroughly. Then the grated lemon zest, and mix well.
3. Cut the bread — crusts off. Slices, round pieces, or “still again into diamond shapes.” The crust is removed, which is not fussiness: crust does not absorb, and in a dairy-free batter this thick there is not much liquid to spare.
4. Soak a full half hour. Longer than a milk custard needs, because there is no milk thinning the eggs and it penetrates slowly. Stale bread is required, not preferred.
5. Fry in boiling lard. A frying pan with enough hot lard to fry properly — this is closer to a shallow deep-fry than to griddling in butter. Lay in the bread and fry to a golden brown. -> photo 1
6. Lift with a skimmer and drain on brown paper in the mouth of the oven. That is the book’s instruction and it is a good one: the residual heat keeps them crisp while the fat drains instead of soaking back in.
7. Finish. Onto a hot dish, sprinkled with powdered sugar “as you would fritters,” a little grated nutmeg if you like, served hot.
8. If you want the milk version, the book has it and it is a different recipe: Spanish Toast — Rôtis à l’Espagnole, p. 263. 1 egg, 1 cup milk, 1 gill brandy or rum, 3 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, half an ounce each of powdered nutmeg and cinnamon, 6 slices of stale bread, soaked half an hour, fried in boiling lard, served with milk or cream.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t The backbone is The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, fifth edition, published by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1916 and copyrighted 1901, 1906, 1910 and 1916. The scan is the Cornell University copy, and it is in our Reference Library: library.fubsypoly.com/picayunes-creole-cook-book-1916.pdf I read the quantities off the page images rather than the OCR. The optical text of this book renders every fraction as a hyphenated pair — 1-2 for a half, 1 1-2 for one and a half — and it misread the 5 eggs in Pain Perdu as a letter B. If you go back to the scan yourself, go to the page image. UNTESTED. I have not cooked this version. The measurements are the book’s, converted to modern phrasing but not re-proportioned, and where the original is vague I have said so rather than inventing a number.

⚠ Five eggs, not six — and why I am mentioning it The Internet Archive’s OCR of this page renders the quantity as “B Eggs.” It is 5. I read it off the page image. This is the clearest single example of why the scan’s text layer is not a safe source for quantities in this book, and it is the reason every number in these seven recipes was taken from the images.

⭐ The three soaked-bread dishes, and what the distinction is worth Set out plainly, because the book takes trouble over it and modern usage has collapsed all three into one:

• Pain Perdu — “Lost Bread or Egg Toast” (p. 262). Eggs, sugar, orange flower water, lemon zest, optional brandy. No dairy. Soaked, fried.
• Spanish Toast — Rôtis à l’Espagnole (p. 263). Egg, milk, rum or brandy, cinnamon, nutmeg. Soaked, fried. This is what most people mean by French toast.
• Cream or Milk Toast — Rôtis à la Crème ou au Lait (p. 262). Bread toasted first, buttered, then hot milk or cream poured over. Not fried, not soaked raw. The book calls it “a great supper dish among the Creole plantation homes of Louisiana.” So the French name did not attach to the milk-and-egg version. It attached to the one that rescues stale bread with eggs alone — which is exactly what pain perdu, lost bread, means.

Feeding this back into the custard test Your four arms are whole milk, evaporated, cream, and evaporated diluted 1:1. This recipe is effectively a zero-dairy control you did not have — 5 eggs and half a cup of sugar with no milk at all, at a much higher egg-to-liquid ratio than any of your arms. If the question is what the dairy is actually doing, a no-dairy arm is the obvious baseline. The prediction that falls out of the composition is a firmer, more custardy, more omelette-adjacent interior and faster browning from the extra sugar and protein — and that is a prediction, not a result.

Orange flower water The ingredient that makes this taste like New Orleans rather than a diner. It is distilled from bitter orange blossom, it is powerful, and two tablespoonfuls in five eggs is assertive by modern standards — start at one if you have not cooked with it. It is the same perfume that runs through the book’s cakes and its Baba. Middle Eastern and North African grocers carry it cheaply; the tiny bottles in the baking aisle cost several times as much for the same thing.

Sourcing and gear Lard is the frying fat and the book means it — “boiling lard,” enough to fry in, not a buttered griddle. Stale bread means genuinely dry, which in 1916 meant day-old French bread from a bakery that used no preservatives. Modern sandwich bread will turn to paste in a thirty-minute soak; use a real crusty loaf and dry it out if it is not already stale.

Still open Why the book files the milk version under Spanish toast. That is a genuinely odd naming and I have found nothing explaining it. If there is a Spanish torrija connection — and torrijas are milk-soaked, fried, and eaten at Lent — then the naming is not odd at all and is in fact exactly right. I have not confirmed that the Picayune’s editors meant it that way, so I am flagging it as the likely explanation rather than the established one.