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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a simple dish of buttered toast topped with a smooth milk or cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a pan until it bubbles.

  2. Add the flour and salt, stirring to combine.

  3. Gradually add the hot milk, stirring until the mixture is smooth.

Serve on toast

  1. To prepare moist toast, quickly dip dry toast into hot salted water.

  2. Pour the sauce over the slices of dry or moist 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. Butter + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 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

Butter
Fat that is melted to start the roux and adds rich flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Cooked with the butter to form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk or cream
Liquid that, heated and whisked in, forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot milk, stirring until the mixture is smooth. Adding liquid slowly while stirring lets the starch in the flour disperse evenly, which prevents lumps. Starch thickens the sauce as it heats, so the milk should be hot to keep the sauce from seizing.

“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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