Skip to main content
Main

Cream for Cream Toast

A simple sauce made from milk, butter, and flour, cooked until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream for Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  3. Stir the flour into the melted butter until smooth.

  4. Pour in a little of the hot milk, stirring until smooth. Add the rest of the milk.

  5. Return the mixture to the double boiler and cook for 10 minutes, stirring well to prevent lumps.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 and, when heated, thickens with the flour.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and adding the milk gradually. Flour starch clumps when it meets liquid unevenly. Blending the flour into the melted butter and adding a little hot milk first lets the starch disperse before the rest of the milk goes in, which helps prevent lumps in the finished sauce.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes