The French Toast Notebooks

Welcome to Epicurious'"Cook Like a Diner"series, where we obsess about the simple, iconic, super-crunchy pleasures of diner food—and figure out how to make those classic dishes at home.

When I was 22 years old, I was broke but I felt rich, because my union newsroom job paid me weekly, I rented a relatively cheap studio in a then-sleepy Brooklyn neighborhood, and the only thing I ever spent money on was French toast. I ate it constantly. My newsroom shifts started at 5 pm some days, 5 am other days, 1 am on the worst days, and while everybody else was working, I was roaming from diner to diner, from toast to toast.

I carried a notebook with me. If it was Wednesday, I carried the newspaper, too, because I was obsessed with the Dining In/Dining Out section ofThe New York Times. I’d take a booth behind a crew of school-skipping, cigarette-smoking teenagers, or a group of Chinese grandmothers, and spread the paper out. The plate of French toast went on top, and I ate while reading about restaurants I figured I’d never have the money to visit.

TheTimeslargely ignored French toast. They definitely ignored diners. And that's why I had my notebook. A few weeks earlier I'd decided my newsroom job didn't suit me—I wanted to write about lifestyle. So my boyfriend and I sat at a diner, eating and smoking until we figured out how I'd make that happen.

The empty, syrupy plates in front of us sparked the idea. “I’ll write the definitive guide to diner French toast!” I declared.

“Yes,” my boyfriend said calmly. He was the assistant to a Conde Nast editor-in-chief. He seemed to know how these things worked. “And you’ll sell it to the Times.”

So I was off. I trekked to diners in Long Island City and the Upper East Side, in Brooklyn Heights and Harlem. I hiked to ancient diners only to find that they had shuttered weeks before, and to newish diners, most of them in Chelsea, that served plates of fussy cornflake-crusted brioche French toast (and thus weren’t really diners at all). Every week I thought about making a reservation atNorma’sin the Parker Meridian Hotel on 57th Street, where a lauded French toast with a $29 price tag was served. But I never did, because Norma’s was definitely not a diner, and I never had the cash.

As soon as the French toast hit the table, I’d bring out the notebook and sketch a rudimentary chart to track the vitals. I noted the type of bread, the thickness, the way it was served. Patterns emerged quickly:

The Bread Was Challah.Every self-respecting diner used challah or some sort of dense, mystery white bread. Brioche was rare. Baguette was a sign that I was A) not in a diner, or B) in a place that didn’t know anything about French toast.

The Thickness Was Goldilocks.The best French toasts featured bread slices that were neither very thick nor super thin (¾ inch=optimal?I wrote in my notebook). I swear I saw slices of French toast that were thick as my fist during this period, but those only looked impressive—inside, they were dry and bready. (Thickness: 2”, and not the better for it.)

The Presentation Was Architectural.片被炸后斜剪,they were arranged on top of each other, each massive slice crushing the one beneath it. They were always finished with powdered sugar, the syrup on the side. (Better w.o. syrup, I wrote, but this was a judgement more on the sickly industrial syrup diners use than on anything else.)

The Fashion Was Leopard Print.Like leopard print.I actually wrote that. Forgive the cliché—it was a reference to the speckled spots where the sizzling butter caught a bit ofegg custardand browned it.

These exemplars of French toast weren’t hard to find—I scouted several in a matter of just weeks. And yet I kept searching. There were always diners I hadn’t visited. And just when I thought I had a fairly comprehensive list, one of the diners I liked would quietly and unceremoniously close. In this way, the hunt got harder with time—it seemed that whenever one of those diners closed, a place like Norma’s would replace it.

How to Make the Ultimate French Toast

I built a habitual life around hunting for French toast, and after several months I forgot why I was doing it. I sought out new diners less and gravitated more to the ones I knew and liked. And I started leaving my notebook at home. What more did I have to note? These were days without surprises. I knew how many cups of coffee it took to wash a plate of French toast down (two and a half), I knew how disgustingly full I would feel when I finished said plate, and I knew that exactly 90 minutes later I’d have burned off all those sugary white-bread calories and be starving again. When that happened, I’d seek out another diner, this time for a tuna melt.

But even in that short span of six months, dependable diner meals became harder to find. I kept reading stories in theTimesabout restaurants that had moved into old diner spaces, spots with young chefs whose idea of diner food was ricotta pancakes with rhubarb compote and sour cream. I dutifully checked out these new diners, but after a few $17 plates of brioche French toast drizzled with creme anglaise, I gave up my project altogether. It seemed that I had started my project too late, or taken too long to pull it off—in the half-year I’d spent reporting on diner French toast, diner French toast had started to die.

至少,这是看它的一种方式。另一个佤邦y is to say that the national food obsession that started around that time didn't kill French toast but gave it life. That chefs everywhere used French toast as inspiration by calling itpain perdu, and slapping it with rhubarb compote and a $14 price tag. A few years after ending my ill-fated French toast project, I was a full-time food writer living in Chicago, and those are exactly the French toasts I pushed onto my readers.

In fact, I'd forsaken diner French toast for 10 years, until out of nowhere I was hit with a very specific craving. This was a problem—the diner scene in Chicago (never that robust to begin with) had deteriorated even more than that in New York. I only had one choice: I’d have to cook it myself.

It never got old. (Until it kind of did.)

Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Prop Styling by Alex Brannian, Food Styling by Rhoda Boone

I was deep in that chefy, artisanal lifestyle. And so when I reached for a recipe, I consulted the most fashionable cookbook at the time,Tartine Bread. The book had me buy a loaf of bread that cost about ten dollars, cut it into thick slices, and let those slices dry out overnight. In the morning, I dutifully soaked the slices in a lemon zest custard until they were so wet they could barely be moved. I fried the slices in butter, finished them in a hot oven until they puffed into souffles, and ate them slathered with Greek yogurt, jam, and honey.

I took three bites before I pushed the plate away.

It was not what I had wanted. It was too rich, too precious, too time-intensive. There was no powdered sugar here. Instead, the book had suggested I serve the French toast with persimmon.

It was shortly after that breakfast that I started a new French toast notebook. Just like I decided a decade before, there would be no fancy French toasts in these pages. Nothing that would cost eight dollars. Nothing you'd see on a brunch menu. For God's sake, nothing with persimmon.

Still, this notebook was filled with a different sort of shorthand.1 cup whole milk. 2 eggs. 1 teaspoon cinnamon.

If I couldn't find the best French toast at a diner anymore, I could at least create a version that was diner-style.

Prop Credit: Select props courtesy ofFishs Eddy