by changing the name you changed the recipe
this is a leftovers stan account
It was 2010-ish. My whole family was hooked on Desperate Housewives. On this week’s episode, Katherine Mayfair was dousing a stack of a golden carb I didn’t recognise in maple syrup. “Cinnamon brioche French toast”.
I was still far from fluent in English, but I knew all those words: cinnamon is the cannelle that goes on tarte aux pommes, brioche is brioche, French is me, and toast is… sliced white bread after a stint in the grille-pain?
Then how can it be both brioche and toast? Why is she using a pan for that? It’s going to get spongy under all that syrup. Wait, since when do we have a special national toast, and why has no one told me?
A quick Google was all it took to calm my culinary existential crisis. It’s fine, guys, French toast is just pain perdu. We can all relax.
My father has always prided himself on making a mean pain perdu (and he does), which I believe he learned from his own father. In carrying on the family tradition, it’s the first recipe I reach for if I ever find myself with an old bit of bread. When he taught me how to make it he also taught me the meaning of the name: “lost bread”, a loaf that’s too stale to eat but too good to go, almost lost but now found.
The recipe actually bears many names, both in and out of France.
Many of them are in the same vein, describing a cheap dish that can be made with what you have lying around. Germany has Arme Ritter, the same wording as England’s poor knights. My personal favourite is the Netherlands’ gewonnen brood – “gained bread”.
Quite a few make mention of “crusts” rather than bread: croûte dorée in Switzerland, crostini col vino in Italy. Some are just very literal, like Türkiye’s yumurtalı ekmek and good ol’ eggy bread.
When I say “recipe”, I really just mean the act of dipping stale bread in egg and an optional liquid, often milk, sometimes wine or stronger spirits. Of course the recipe isn’t French. Of course any culture that has ever baked bread and kept birds has long since put two and two together. Of course they have always found ways not to let their daily staple, the centre of their community and, for many, a food with strong religious connotations go to waste.
This is where, language skills aside, I struggled to reconcile Katherine Mayfair’s thick golden brioche slices and my father’s childhood pantry snack made from the butt of a three-day-old baguette. When the name was changed, the meaning got lost in translation.
Out of the many hypotheses for why “French toast” was the name that stuck for English speakers (and Mexico, who has pan francés) is simply that calling anything “French” instantly makes it sound fancy. I believe it. Certainly more than I believe the myth that some guy in Albany named Joseph French was the first to sell it in the US but lacked the grammar skills to call it “French’s toast”.
This is exactly how we recently ended up with everybody and their mother placing charcuterie boards, France’s go-to bar snack, on a luxury pedestal, until all sorts of other foods made their way onto the board and the meaning of the word charcuterie (cold cuts) was lost by the end of the month.
And so pain perdu went on a gap year abroad and came back to Europe with a cool new name, and now I’m paying £13 for it in brunch spots up and down the UK. Happily, I may add – it’s delicious.
I truly believe that swapping brioche for stale old bread and adding syrups and cream and nuts and fresh fruits is an innovation. But that’s what French toast, not pain perdu, is to me: a completely different dish with a completely different intention. Risotto and rice pudding are both rice that’s been cooked in a flavourful liquid. French toast, just like pain perdu, crostini al vino and all the other variants I mentioned earlier, is bread dipped in egg and liquid and then fried.
The reason I’m telling you all this is that at least once a week I’ll stumble upon someone on the internet learning for the first time that you can easily make pickles, or jam, or yoghurt at home, and no one had told them before because most people in Western countries no longer have a survival need to preserve or extend the life of their precious food.
According to NGO Wrap, UK households throw away an average of 95kg of food per person per year – and the most wasted foods are potatoes, cooked leftovers and bread. Bread! That you can make pain perdu out of, yes, but also breadcrumbs, croûtons, bread pudding, bruschette, crostini… But if no one ever tells you that the bread you thought you lost can be found again, if you’ve only ever seen it called French toast or packaged in bags pre-staled for you, how would you know?
Whoever did the PR for turning blackened bananas into banana bread, you have 24 hours to respond.
.jpg "Six people sitting around a huge amount of food they've arranged in a circle on the lawn of a park.")
The picture I used for this post’s cover is of one of Robin Greenfield’s “Food Waste Fiasco” events. On a few occasions while on a bike ride across the USA where he got most of his food from dumpster diving, he displayed all the still perfectly edible food he’d found the night before in a public park, where it could be donated and used to educate people on the reality of food waste in America.
I cannot in good faith finish a post segueing from a TV series into using up the food we already have without mentioning the French leftovers OG herself: Fais Pas Çi Fais Pas Ça’s Fabienne Lepic, renowned for her Fourzitou (“fourres-y tout”, literally “stuff everything in it”), a gratin made up of the week’s leftovers.
According to this article, complete with low-res screenshots of culinary crimes, one fourzitou included a mixture of cod brandade, cooked beetroot and creamed spinach. A sustainable queen.