Skip to main content
Main

Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a toasted bread served with a thickened milk and cream mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream sauce

  1. Heat the milk and salt in a basin over boiling water.

  2. In a separate bowl, rub the butter and flour together until smooth.

  3. Once the milk is hot, stir in the butter and flour mixture, stirring occasionally until slightly thickened.

  4. Add the cream and let it scald.

Assemble and serve

  1. Toast the bread quickly to prevent drying; scrape off any burnt edges.

  2. Dip each piece of toast in the cream and arrange them in two piles in a deep dish.

  3. Pour the remaining cream over the toast, cover, and serve immediately.

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

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and richness, and helps thicken it when worked with flour.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the sauce coats the toast instead of running off.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the milk. Flour thickens only when the liquid is hot and it is stirred so lumps do not form. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened rather than clumpy.

“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.

More cream toast recipes

Cheese 6Tomato 5 See all 93 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes