In French, French toast is called "pain perdu" because it's made with old, stale bread (pain=bread, perdu=lost). Spousal Unit and I are big fans of making French toast out of the stale bread hanging around the house. Today we made French toast with some week-old sourdough bread.
We use three eggs. Many people will tell you to use fewer, but we find that three eggs for half a loaf works. We also add maple syrup in the batter because a bad cook told me to do that once.
The bad cook in question was the original cook at the vegetarian place I used to frequent when I was in grad school. She made these gawd-awful wraps and chickpea mushes that gave vegetarian food a bad name. The only thing she made well was French toast. One day I asked her the secret of her French toast and she said "maple syrup". She put maple syrup in the batter. That made the bread caramelize and gave it a woodsy-sweet taste.
She eventually left -- or was fired, I don't know. She was replaced by this fantastic cook who turned the place around and totally made it happening. He got rid of the wraps and added black bean burritos and hemp burgers and blueberry upside-down cake and brownies and then this local celebrity started hanging out there because he was in love with the waitress, but then she left to be a nanny somewhere and he stopped coming and then I graduated and the place was sold and it's probably totally different now.
Anyways.
Because of that first gawd-awful cook, I started adding maple syrup to my French toast batter and never looked back -- except for that time when I made Nigella Lawson's doughnut French toast, but that was because her boobs told me to.
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