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Bettered Toast

Toast served with a peppered cream sauce made from butter, flour, and boiling water.

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 ↓

Bettered Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut the bread into thin, even slices and trim off the crust.

  2. Warm each side of the bread.

  3. Toast one side over bright, hot coals until it turns a rich, even brown. Toast the other side in the same manner.

  4. Butter the toast and serve immediately.

Make the cream sauce

  1. For a cream sauce, beat together the butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and dust with pepper.

  3. Place the sauce over a kettle of boiling water for 10 minutes.

  4. Dip the toast into the sauce and serve hot.

Alternative method

  1. Alternatively, dip each slice of toast in boiling salted water, spread with butter, cover, and keep 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, cohesive cream sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the toast and the sauce.
Bread
Provides the base that absorbs the sauce and toasts to a brown crust.

The step that matters

Beat the butter and flour until smooth before adding the water. Flour lumps form if it is not fully blended into the fat first. Once the boiling water is added, those lumps are hard to remove, which leaves the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

“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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