In comments on Matthew Yglesias’s post on French Toast, Daniel Davies notes that the etymology of everyone has been citing may be incomplete. Looks like he’s right, in a way that adds interesting philosophical questions to the conundrum. (Questions beyond the questions of how individuals like the House Republicans could possibly be the product of millenia of evolution. I take every one of them to be a data point for Gould in his debates with Dawkins et al.)

Most of the evidence I’ll be drawing on here is from Modern Dishes in Medieval Guise by HL Rycheza z Polska. I know this is just an internet article, but (a) there is a pretty comprehensive bibliography listed, so if there are mistakes they can be checked somewhere, and (b) everything else I found supports what is written here. Of course, for philosophical purposes it doesn’t really matter what the facts are, but some people may actually care about such things.

The recipe for what we now call French Toast can be found at least in Roman times. Apicius describes a dish that as follows (translation by Joseph Vehling):

Break fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk fry in oil, cover in honey and serve.

So the recipe itself is nothing new. And there are similar recipes under all sorts of names throughout medieval times. But the name first appears somewhat later. Most of the names for the recipe in these times are variations on lost bread. The first appearance of our name I could find is by Robert May in The Accomplisht Cook, from 1660. Here’s what he says

Cut French Bread, and toast it in pretty thick toasts on a clean gridiron, and serve them steeped in claret, sack, or any wine, with sugar and juice of orange.

And then, as several others have noted (e.g. here, here and here) something like the current recipe is served under the description “French Toast” by Robert French in his diner in Albany, NY in 1724. Some of the discussions of French’s contributions suggest that the recipe is original to America, as is the name. So we have Daniel Rogov saying

First made at a roadside tavern not far from the city of Albany in 1724, there are few dishes more truly American than the breakfast favorite known as "French toast". So American is the dish that very few can understand why it is not called "American toast", "Albany Toast" or even "New York State toast".

Well, this is pretty clearly mistaken, since Apicius is somewhat pre-American, but maybe the name is original.

What I don’t know is what the causal relationship is between our usage of the term and either May’s usage or French’s. But May’s usage is by far the most interesting, because it raises the following neat question. Is May’s term synonymous with ours? He associates with a different recipe, but lots of people have different preferred recipes for spaghetti Bolognese, but that doesn’t mean they do not have synonymous terms here. They may just disagree about how to cook the one thing. I can see four options, not all of which are possibly worth taking seriously.

1. May’s term is synonymous with ours, but he is wrong about what his own term means – he doesn’t realise it’s analytic that French toast is cooked in dairy products.
2. May’s term is synonymous with ours, but we are wrong about what our own term means – we don’t realise that it is not analytic that French toast is cooked in dairy products.
3. May’s term is synonymous with ours, and we have a culinary disagreement here about how to cook the one thing – French toast.
4. The meaning has drifted from May’s day to ours.

So maybe you don’t like all the options, but I think they are different. Of course, Quine may not have agreed, and tomorrow I have to teach a class saying why not. So no more research for now.