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Bread

Buttered Toast

A simple toast made with butter, optional salt, and a butter mixture of butter, flour, and boiling water.

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 ↓

Buttered Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and toast

  1. Cut the bread into thin, even slices and trim off the crusts.

  2. Warm each side of the bread, then toast one side over a hot fire until brown.

  3. Toast the other side in the same manner.

Butter and serve

  1. Spread butter on the warm toast and serve immediately.

Make the butter mixture

  1. For a butter mixture, beat 1 cup of butter with 3 tablespoons of flour, then pour in 1½ pints of boiling water and heat over a kettle for 10 minutes before dipping the toast in it.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Bread
Provides the base that browns and crisps when toasted over direct heat.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the warm toast for flavour and moisture.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture as it heats with the water.

The step that matters

Toasting each side until brown. Browning comes from dry, high heat acting on the bread's surface sugars and starches. If the heat is too fierce, the outside scorches before the inside dries and crisps, leaving bitter toast.

“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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