Read QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition for Free Online Page A

Dipping bread in eggs and frying it is a pretty universal solution to making stale bread go further.
    The French certainly had a medieval version called tostees dorees , ‘golden toast’, and this later became pain perdu , ‘lost bread’, a name that has been enthusiastically adopted for the de luxe versions served in Cajun cooking.
    The earliest recorded recipe for the dish occurs in the work of the Roman cook Apicius in the first century AD. In his book The Art of Cooking, he writes, rather casually, that it’s just ‘another sweet dish’: ‘Break fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces. Soak them in milk, fry in oil, cover in honey and serve.’
    There are references in early French documents to this recipe as pain à la Romaine , ‘Roman bread’. So, that makes it Italian Toast. As ever, it depends where you are at the time, as there are records of German Toast, Spanish Toast, American Toast and even Nun’s Toast being used.
    ‘French toast’ is first recorded in English in 1660 when it appears in The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May. In the same year, Gervase Markham’s influential The English Huswife has a rich and spicy version of ‘pamperdy’ ( pain perdu ), so, as far as the English were concerned, French toast was French, in those days at least.
    However, the dish was also sometimes referred to as ‘Poor Knights of Windsor’. This finds its counterpart in the German ( arme Ritter ), Danish ( arme riddere ), Swedish ( fattiga riddare ) and Finnish ( köyhät ritarit ) versions – all of which mean ‘poor knights’.
    One theory offered in explanation is that the most expensive part of a medieval banquet was dessert – spices and nuts were costly imports. Although titled, not all knights were rich, so a dish of fried eggy-bread served with jam or honeywould have fulfilled the requirements of etiquette without breaking the bank.
    STEPHEN I leave you with this mysterious quatrain from Stephen Wright, the Nostradamus de nos jours. ‘I went to a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time. So I ordered French toast: during the Renaissance.’ Good night.
     

Who invented champagne?
     
     
    Not the French.
    It may come as surprise – even an outrage – to them but champagne is an English invention.
    As anyone who has made their own ginger beer knows, fermentation naturally produces bubbles. The problem has always been controlling it.
    The English developed a taste for fizzy wine in the sixteenth century, importing barrels of green, flat wine from Champagne and adding sugar and molasses to start it fermenting. They also developed the strong coal-fired glass bottles and corks to contain it.
    As the records of the Royal Society show, what is now called méthode champenoise was first written down in England in 1662. The French added finesse and marketing flair but it wasn’t until 1876 that they perfected the modern dry or brut style (and even then it was for export to England).
    The UK is France’s largest customer for champagne. In 2004, 34 million bottles were consumed in Britain. This is almost a third of the entire export market – twice as much as the USA, three times as much as the Germans and twentytimes as much as the Spanish.
    The Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon (1638–1715) did not invent champagne: in fact he spent most of his time trying to remove the bubbles.
    His famous exclamation: ‘Come quickly, I am drinking the stars’, was devised for an advertisement in the late nineteenth century. Pérignon’s real legacy to champagne was in the skilful blending of grape varieties from different vineyards and the use of a wire or hempen cage for the cork.
    A legal loophole uniquely allows Americans to call their sparkling wines champagne. The Treaty of Madrid (1891) decreed that only the Champagne region may use that name. This was reaffirmed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) but the US signed a separate peace agreement with Germany.
    When prohibition was lifted, American