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Cheese Cream Toast

A toasted bread topped with grated cheese and a thickened milk and flour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Cheese Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the toast

  1. Toast the stale bread slices.

  2. Cover the toast with grated cheese.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a saucepan, bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water, then stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Cook the mixture until it thickens, then season with salt and butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the toast and cheese in the oven at 400°F (200°C) for 3-4 minutes.

  2. Pour the cream over the toast and cheese 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Stale bread
Provides a dry, sturdy base that holds the cheese and sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Plain flour
Its starch swells as it heats, thickening the milk into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour added straight into boiling milk clumps before its starch can disperse. Mixing it with cold water first makes a smooth slurry, so the starch thickens the milk evenly.

“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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