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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is toast dipped in a lightly thickened milk, butter, flour, and cream mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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

Make the cream sauce

  1. Heat the milk and salt in a basin over boiling water.

  2. Rub the butter and flour together until smooth.

  3. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the hot milk.

  4. Stir occasionally until slightly thickened.

  5. Add the cream. Let it scald.

Toast and assemble

  1. Toast the bread quickly to prevent drying. Scrape off any burned edges with a knife.

  2. Dip each piece of toast in the cream.

  3. Arrange the dipped toast in two piles in a deep dish.

  4. Pour the remaining cream over the toast. Cover the dish. 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. Butter + breadtop 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which becomes creamy when heated.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and helps it turn smooth and rich.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a light sauce when stirred in with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce and soaks into the toast.
Bread
Soaks up the warm cream, becoming soft and rich under the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the hot milk. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unblended, so rubbing it with butter first and stirring steadily helps the sauce thicken smoothly without lumps.

“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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