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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is a simple dish of toast served with warm salted milk and optional thickened 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 ↓

Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and serve

  1. Prepare hot crisp toast or twice-baked bread.

  2. Combine hot milk and salt in a pitcher.

  3. Pour the salted milk over the toast as needed.

Make the thicker sauce

  1. Mix flour and a little milk to make a paste for a thicker sauce.

  2. Heat the remaining milk.

  3. Add the flour paste to the milk.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes while stirring constantly.

  5. Alternatively, cook flour in fat before adding milk for a quicker sauce.

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. Milk + breadtop 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes the sauce and soaks into the toast.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Toast or twice-baked bread
Provides a dry, crisp base that soaks up the salted milk sauce.
Butter or bacon fat
Adds richness and flavour, and can be cooked with the flour for a quicker sauce.

The step that matters

Boil for 5 minutes while stirring constantly. Constant stirring keeps the flour from clumping and scorching on the bottom of the pan. Boiling swells the flour's starch granules so the sauce thickens fully.

“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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