Sometimes I scroll through the Apicius cookbook and yearn for the days when I could buy ingredients. Or use an oven. Or a microwave.

Well, I’ve found one more Apicius recipe I can do. I think it’s basically French toast. As always, here is the link to the source material:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm#bkvii_chxiii

And here’s a snip of the specific recipe we’ll be covering today, from the “sweetmeats” section of the text:

Soak bread in milk and eggs, fry in oil, serve with honey. That’s basically French toast, right?

Yes. It turns out that yes, it is.

The recipe calls for “fine white bread”. Regrettably, I was only able to do this recipe when I found a hitherto undiscovered lump of week-old whole wheat sourdough raisin bread in the back of my refrigerator. (By raisin bread, I do not mean sweet bread. The bread has no sugar in it. It is just regular bread with the occasional raisin, and it is a week old.) There’s only enough of it for a few small slices, which is perfect.

The recipe also calls for the crusts of the bread to be removed, which I shall not do. Sorry, Apicius, but I am not one of those people. Eat your crusts like an adult, my dear anonymous Roman chef. You are two thousand years old.

Anyway! The bread was sliced and dipped in a mixture of one egg and a quarter of a cup of milk, and then it was fried. I didn’t actually add the honey on top of all the toast, but I did leave a spoon of it off to the side of the dish in order that anyone that wished might consume it. I tried it with honey. It tasted fine. Here are some pictures.

I ended up having a few tablespoons of the milk and egg mixture left over when I ran out of bread, so I added a little flour and made one perfect little pancake.

Overall, this was a pleasant little breakfast treat for the whole family, and a good way to say farewell to that random lump of bread. Would I do it again? I don’t know. It seems too extravagant and unnecessary for day-to-day life, when one might find it more filling to cook and eat eggs and bread separately. But maybe this is a good one to keep in the back of my head as a treat. It’s good on its own, and I found the honey to be unnecessary, but not unpleasant. I also really find old hard bread with eggs more justifiable than the modern atrocity people call french toast- all white and soft and sugar. Why? What, exactly, is the purpose?

Without much else to say, I’m going to take some time to consider how the French somehow got all the credit for the universal human experience of cooking bread and eggs together.

It turns out Americans call it French toast because it was brought by early French settlers, which called it “lost bread” because they made it from bread that was otherwise too old and brittle to do much else with.

How did we fall so far? I do not know. It is worth nothing that Apicius frames this as a dessert, to me made of rare white bread for the wealthy of Rome. It’s possible, then, that the concept of fried bread as a bread-saving strategy evolved across cultures at the same time as the concept of fried bread as a decadent dessert. Both certainly have historic precedent, and I grudgingly accept both as valid culinary experiences.

Tune in next time for whatever else I can find that is historically relevant and cookable on the stove. On the off-chance that anyone ever reads this: please comment some recipe ideas. I don’t really want to be reduced to Victorian single-vegetable soups, but we will see.