Poor Knights

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

poor knights a late 17th- and early 18th-century English name for a rich dish of fried bread, similar to French pain perdu. John Nott (1726) directs the cook to cut penny loaves into round slices, dip them in cream or water, and then in a mixture of eggs, cream, sugar, and nutmeg. The bread was fried in butter, with the rest of the egg mixture poured onto it, and served with butter, sugar, and rosewater. Less rich recipes called for the bread to be soaked in milk or wine, dipped in egg yolk, and served with jam or sugar and cinnamon.