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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a dish of stale bread soaked in a buttered milk and egg white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut off the crusts from the bread slices.

  2. Dip each slice in salted boiling water.

  3. Pile the slices in a deep covered dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk until scalding.

  2. Add the butter and melted butter.

  3. Beat the egg whites to a froth.

  4. Add the froth to the milk mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the toast.

  2. Lift the lower slices to let the sauce soak in.

  3. Cover the dish.

  4. Keep hot for 5 minutes before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Baker's bread
Stale slices provide the structure that soaks up the sauce and holds its shape.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the creamy sauce that softens the toast.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that give the sauce a smooth, rounded flavour.
Eggs
Whites beaten to a froth lighten the sauce and add a soft, airy texture.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a froth. Whites must be beaten until frothy but not stiff so they fold into the hot sauce as a light foam. Over-beating makes them dry and clumpy, so they will not blend smoothly into the sauce.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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