The French and toast

My wife made French toast for a Sunday morning treat today (and she makes it very well - using a French stick cut thickly, and the bread soaked in the milk and eggs overnight.)

We eat it with maple syrup, which led to the question - do the French eat French toast, 'cos the syrup makes it seem more like an American meal.

So off to Wikipedia it is, where the French toast entry is not as detailed as I feel it deserves, but it at least tells us the recipe pre-dates France quite considerably.  (Basically, it goes back to Roman days, and has been seen in many countries as a good way to make stale bread palatable.)

This entry on the history of the dish at "Today I Found Out" (a site which has a very appealing name for someone like me) is much more readable.  The site says this:

Indeed, the name for French toast in France itself is “pain perdu”, which literally means “lost bread” (it is also called this in Belgium, New Orleans, Acadiana, Newfoundland, and the Congo, among other places). It’s interesting to note, for the naysayers who like to cling to the belief that it came from France, that before the French called it pain perdu, they called it “pain a la Romaine” (Roman bread).

And this: 

In France itself, French toast is highly sweetened and is served as a dessert item, rather than served for breakfast, as in America and many other places.

So, now we know.