Skip to main content
Main

Cracker Toast

A toasted cracker dish served with a thickened milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Cracker Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler until boiling.

  2. Add the diced butter and stir until melted.

  3. Mix the salt and flour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  4. Add the mixture to the boiling milk.

  5. Stir continuously until the mixture thickens.

  6. Keep it warm on the back of the stove.

Assemble and serve

  1. Toast the crackers.

  2. Let the toasted crackers sit in boiling salted water for a few minutes.

  3. Place the crackers in a deep dish.

  4. Pour the thickened milk over the crackers.

  5. Serve covered.

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 that thickens and coats the crackers.
Flour or corn starch
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

Stir continuously until the mixture thickens. Flour or starch can clump or scorch on the hot base if not stirred. Constant stirring keeps the thickener dispersed so the starch granules swell evenly into a smooth 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