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Fish on Toast

A toast topped with a sauce of fish, milk or cream, flour, butter, salt, pepper, and garnished with hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fish on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Pick the fish into flakes and place in a saucepan.

  2. Stir 1 teaspoon of flour with enough butter to cream it, then add the butter-flour mixture to the milk.

  3. Stir flour with a little cream to thicken the cream.

  4. Heat the mixture until it comes to a boil, then remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the toast.

  2. Garnish with hard boiled eggs.

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. Fish + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Fish + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  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

Flour
Thickens the milk or cream into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Butter
Creams with the flour so it blends into the liquid without lumps.
Milk or cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that coats the fish.
Fish
Provides the main flavour and flaked texture of the sauce.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the milk. Flour added straight to hot liquid clumps. Creaming it with butter first, or stirring it into cold cream, spreads the starch evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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