French Toast Sticks with Maple Dipping Sauce
Golden crispy French toast fingers with warm maple syrup for dipping — a dish whose milk-and-egg bread technique dates to ancient Rome, whose "lost bread" name comes from medieval France, and whose maple dip is a gift from North America's indigenous peoples.
- 1 loafbrioche bread(unsliced, day-old preferred)
- 4 largeeggs
- 1 cupwhole milk
- 2 tbspsugar
- 1 tspvanilla extract
- 0.5 tspcinnamon
- 0.25 tspnutmeg
- 4 tbspbutter(for cooking)
- 1 cuppure maple syrup(warmed)
- powdered sugar(for dusting)
Cooked French toast sticks can be frozen and reheated in 400°F oven for 8-10 minutes. Best served fresh and warm.
- 1Cut brioche into 1-inch thick slices, then into 1-inch wide sticks
- 2Whisk together eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg
- 3Dip bread sticks into egg mixture, coating all sides
- 4Let excess drip off
- 5Melt butter in large skillet or griddle over medium heat
- 6Cook sticks 2-3 minutes per side until golden brown on all sides
- 7Keep warm in 200°F oven while cooking remaining batches
- 8Dust with powdered sugar
- 9Serve warm with small cups of maple syrup for dipping
Day-old brioche absorbs custard better without falling apart. Texas toast or challah bread also work well. Don't soak the bread too long or it becomes soggy. The syrup should be warm for best dipping. Add a pinch of salt to the custard to enhance flavors.
French toast carries one of the longest paper trails in food history. The technique of soaking bread in a liquid enriched with eggs or milk and then frying it appears in Roman cooking: a 4th–5th century version of the Apicius cookbook contains a recipe that soaks bread in milk and tops it with honey. The French chef Guillaume Taillevent presented a recipe for tostées dorées — golden toasts — involving eggs and sugar in Le Viandier, written around 1300. A 14th-century German version carries the name Arme Ritter, meaning "poor knights," a name that Wikipedia confirms was also used in English and the Nordic languages. By the 15th century English recipes for pain perdu — the French name for the dish, meaning "lost bread," a reference to the stale or leftover bread it was designed to rescue — were also circulating. The concept is straightforward: bread that would otherwise be discarded is soaked in egg and milk, fried until golden, and sweetened. The French name acknowledges the dish's Roman ancestry with an older title: one early French name for the preparation was le pain à la Romaine, meaning "Roman bread." Despite the name French toast, the dish is not inherently French — versions of it appear independently across German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Indian culinary traditions, each reflecting the same practical logic of turning stale bread into something worth eating. The maple syrup served alongside is as deeply North American as the French toast is global: Algonquian and Iroquois peoples of northeastern North America were the first to collect maple sap and reduce it into syrup, a tradition that European colonists encountered in the 17th century and that remains inseparable from the culinary identity of New England and eastern Canada.