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Bread

Ham Toast

Ham Toast is a dish of bread topped with ham, butter, and a thickened milk and egg mixture.

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 ↓

Ham Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the ham finely.

  2. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

Soak and butter the toast

  1. Dip the toasted slices of bread in the hot milk.

  2. Spread each piece with melted butter and place on a platter.

Make the topping and serve

  1. Add the beaten eggs to the remaining milk and ham, stirring constantly.

  2. Once the mixture thickens, pour it over the toast and serve.

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. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the mixture as their proteins set when heated, creating a sauce-like topping.
Milk
Provides the moist, creamy base that soaks into the bread and forms the sauce.
Bread
Provides the structure and absorbs the hot milk, becoming soft and moist.
Ham
Adds savory, salty flavor to the thickened topping.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and helps the toast taste rounded.

The step that matters

Stirring the eggs into the hot milk and ham. Eggs set quickly when heated, so they can scramble or clump if left unstirred or overheated. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly, so the mixture thickens smoothly into a sauce rather than curdling.

“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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