Skip to main content
Breakfast

Milk Toast

Milk Toast is a dish of toasted bread dipped in a milk and flour mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Toast the bread until light brown on both sides.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water until smooth.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Let it boil for about 1 minute.

  5. Add salt and stir in the butter until melted.

Serve

  1. Dip the toast in the milk and place it on a dish.

  2. Pour the remaining milk 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. 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 milk and holds the sauce.
Milk
Provides the liquid that becomes the sauce and moistens the toast.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Flour lumps form if it is added to hot liquid without being smoothed in cold water first. Stirring while the milk boils keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes