Subject: Alias French Toast

From: [email-masked] (Bob Simmonds)
Date: 20 Oct 1993 09:04:27 -0700

Growing up in Noo Joisey during the 30's and 40's, my family often ate
what is today called French Toast, but *we* called it (phonetically)
AHMAHRITTAH, with accent on the RITT. Ethnically, we were
Irish-Welsh-German. Does anyone out there know the origin of this term?
Has anyone else ever *heard* of it?
-- 
Bob Simmonds  - Dr. R.T. Simmonds
190 East Beach Rd.  Nordland, WA 98358-9622
206-385-2110

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From: [email-masked] (Dorothy J Heydt)
Date: 20 Oct 1993 17:36:59 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>Has anyone else ever *heard* of it?

Yes, I have.  Let me be the first on my block.

The Dutch is "Arme Ridders."  The German would presumably be "Arme
Reiters."  Means "Poor knights."  The English is "Poor Knights of Windsor".

Otherwise, bread soaked in milk (milk and egg, if you're relatively
flush) (water, if you're _really_ broke) and fried.

It is, in fact, a medieval recipe (David Friedman will probably either
post the earliest known occurence, or sternly tell me that it isn't
documented).  It's a way of using up bread that has gotten too hard to
bite, so it doesn't get wasted.

The French for the same thing is "pain perdu," "lost bread."  

Presumably rich knights were willing just to let their stale bread
get lost, but the poor knights had to find a way to salvage it.

Dorothy J. Heydt
[email-masked]	
University of California
Berkeley

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 20 Oct 93 12:06:24 PST

> bite, so it doesn't get wasted.

There is also a version of this in Apicius (anybody have the reference
number?), where you fry the soaked bread in olive oil. Serve with lots of
honey. The bread takes on a custard-like texture, inside a crispy crust. YUM!

We had this (along with lots of other neat stuff) in an Apicius class I had the
good fortune to take. It was a definate hit!

--Anne-Marie Rousseau
e-mail: [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Terry Nutter)
Date: 20 Oct 1993 22:35:19 GMT

Hi.  Terry here.  Dorothy says,

>The French for the same thing is "pain perdu," "lost bread."  

So's the medieval English.  (I seem to have caught this one before
David did.)

There's a recipe for pain perdu in Harlein MS 279, published in
Autin's _Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks_ on page 42.  This MS dates
from around 1435.  Another 15th C recipe can be found in the collection
Constance Hieatt pulished under the title _An Ordinance of Pottage_,
on page 79.  This collection is from somewhere around 1460.

Yup, they're french toast, all right.

I don't know of an earlier English recipe (there is certainly none by
that name or any similar in either of the Anglo-Norman collections edited 
by Hieatt and Jones or in the manuscripts edited by Hieatt and Butler 
published in _Curye on Inglysch_). (They do have recipes for pain fondue, 
but that's more like a bread pudding made with wine; and there's pain ragou, 
and....  These are rich folk's cookbooks; they don't seem automatically 
to have thrown bread out when it was stale.)  Haven't gone through my 
French sources.

Which will teach you to ask about odd names for dishes!

Cheers,

Terry Nutter     Blacksburg, VA     [email-masked]     (703)552-1598