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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is slices of bread dipped in hot milk thickened with corn starch and served with a buttered gravy.

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 ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Toast the slices of bread lightly and butter them.

  2. Stack the buttered toast on a plate.

Make the milk sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until hot.

  2. Dip each slice of buttered toast in the hot milk for 1 minute, then place in a serving dish.

  3. If needed, add more milk to the saucepan after dipping the toast.

  4. Thicken the remaining milk with corn starch until it reaches gravy consistency.

  5. Add salt and a piece of butter to the thickened milk, then pour over the toast.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the milk and gives the dish its body.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps keep the toast from soaking up milk too quickly.
Fresh milk
Provides the liquid that softens the toast and forms the creamy sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a gravy-like sauce as its starch gelatinizes when heated.

The step that matters

Thicken the milk with corn starch. Corn starch must be heated in the liquid to swell and gelatinize. If it is not fully cooked and stirred smoothly, the sauce can stay thin or turn lumpy.

“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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