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Cream Toast

A toast topped with a creamy milk and flour sauce.

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 ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Slice bread into thin slices and toast until golden brown, crisp, and dry.

  2. Place the toast in a wire sieve and steam over hot water until soft.

  3. Butter the toast.

  4. Cut about three slices in half and place them in a soup plate.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the butter until smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the heated milk and cook gently over low heat until the flour loses its starchy taste.

  4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the toast and serve immediately while very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the sauce and softens when steamed.
Milk
Provides the liquid that thickens into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat base that blends into the flour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the milk. Flour must cook gently over low heat so its starch fully swells and the raw, starchy taste disappears. Rushing this leaves the sauce lumpy or tasting of raw flour.

“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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