Tasty Tuesday: 99 Steps French Toast

Nancy Drew Cookbook, 1973

Have I lost my mind, posting a recipe with 99 steps??

Relax, there’s only 3 steps to this recipe, pulled from the pages of The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking by Carolyn Keene. 

This recipe is a nod to The Mystery of the 99 Steps, 43rd volume of the Nancy Drew Mystery series (recipe and forward courtesy of the Nancy Drew Sleuth website.)

This is a very basic recipe for French Toast. To be honest, I’ve made other recipes that sounded much tastier, but hey, the year was 1973 — maybe nobody had thought of using thick slabs of french bread, vanilla extract, heavy whipping cream, honey and pecans back in the day. And maybe that’s why Nancy Drew has kept her slim figure after all these years.

From the Forward:

“How can you become a really good cook?”
“‘It’s no mystery,’ Nancy Drew reveals. ‘You must do what fine cooks have always done–add your own special touch.'”
“How do you do this? Let Nancy show you how. Who would be more intrigued to be an adventurer in cooking than a girl who loves to solve mysteries!”

From Chapter 1: Time for Breakfast, here is:

99 Steps French Toast

Ingredients:

4 thin slices bread

1 egg

1/3 cup milk

1 teaspoon butter

Directions:

Beat the egg until it is frothy. Add milk to the mixture and beat again. Melt butter slowly in a skillet. Soak bread slices one by one in the egg mixture and lift them into the skillet with a pancake turner.

For variation of flavor, try adding cinnamon or freshly squeezed orange juice to the batter.

Brown on each side. Serve with fruit, maple syrup, confectioner’s sugar, cinnamon and sugar to taste.

Stop by Selena Robins’ blog for Sweet, Refreshing Iced Tea plus a few snippets from her contemporary Romance – What a Girl Wants.