I have no idea how to describe this dessert, nor do I know the English name for it. The French name is "Pain Perdu", which, if I recall my high-school French correctly, translates as "Lost bread".

However, the Dutch name, "Wentelteefje", means "Little flipbitch". Don't ask...

I used to eat this a lot when I was a child. I loved it. Now that I have fully functional teeth it is a bit too mushy to my taste.

Ingredients
5 dl whole milk.
100 g. pasteurized eggs.
100 g. butter.
8 slices of bread. (is "casinobread" a word?)
100 g. cinnamon sugar.

Preparation

  1. Put the milk and the egg(s) in a bowl.
  2. Put the butter in a saute pan.
  3. Place the pan on the fire.
  4. Heat the butter.
  5. Pull the slices of bread through the milk-mixture and let them leak out.
  6. Put the bread in the pan, and bake one side till it's goldbrown(-ish).
  7. Flip ("wentel") the bread and bake the other side.
  8. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and serve directly.

If this makes (no) sense, please let me know. This was the first time I translated a recipe, and it wasn't easy. Source o' recipe: SVH.

Dutch artist M.C. Escher named one his curiouser creatures De Pedalternorotandomovens centroeulatus articulosus, to which he thankfully gave the common names of wentelteefje (for females) and rolpens (for males).

These are both references to oddly-named Dutch foods, perhaps with the idea that they sound like animals more than food, so let's just fix that. Wentelteefje, as noted above, is what Americans call French toast and the Dutch call a "little flipbitch" (wentelen, rotating; teef, female dog; -je, young; this is probably a folk etymology), while rolpens is 'rolltripe', a portmanteau of rollmops (pickled herring) and pens (tripe) used to refer to a rather interesting sort of traditional sausage.

These creatures were invented, by Escher's own report, due to the disturbing lack of wheel-shaped creatures in nature. He constructed them first out of clay, and then copied them into ink. They have segmented bodies not dissimilar to a centipede, but with six humanoid legs. They have a chunky head with a beaked nose and flat black eyes protruding to the sides on short stumpy stalks. When they roll up the eyes become the axis, and the long tail wraps around to make a solid wheel; the legs can be used to push the creature along, or can be folded up to the body. Despite the difference in naming, there is no obvious sexual dimorphism among these creatures.

In English we usually translate both wentelteefje and rolpens with the single, boring, unimaginative name of curl-up. These creatures are best known from Escher's lithographs Curl-up (or Wentelteefje, in the original Dutch), in which a series of the creatures are curling up and rolling across a block of text, and House of Stairs, in which they climb a complex series of impossible staircases.

Wentelteefje is pronounced something like 'ventelteyfyeh' (IPA /ˈʋɛn.təlˌteːf.jə/). If you are having trouble visualizing one, they are well worth a quick internet search.

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