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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is a simple dish of toasted bread soaked in a buttered milk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the toast

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Toast the dry pieces of bread in the oven until they are a fine even brown.

  3. Dip the toasted bread into boiling salted water and butter.

  4. Place the dipped bread in a dish.

Make the milk sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the milk.

  2. Mix the corn starch (or flour) with the butter.

  3. Stir the mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Add salt to taste and cook for a few minutes.

  5. Pour the milk mixture over the toast.

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 + 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. Corn + buttertop 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

Dry bread
Forms the base that soaks up the milk sauce and holds its shape when toasted.
Rich milk
Provides the liquid and creamy body of the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the boiling milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and coats the starch so it blends smoothly into the milk.

The step that matters

Stir the starch into the boiling milk. Corn starch or flour must be mixed with butter first and stirred into boiling milk so it disperses evenly. Added directly to cold liquid or left unstirred, it clumps, and the sauce stays lumpy instead of thickening 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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