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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a dish of toast topped with a butter, flour, salt, 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

  2. Add the flour and salt, stirring constantly.

  3. Gradually add the hot milk, allowing the mixture to thicken each time.

Prepare and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over dry or moist toast.

  2. To prepare moist toast, quickly dip dry toast into hot salted water or hot milk.

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
Adds fat and rich flavor to the roux that starts the sauce.
Flour
Its starch thickens the sauce as it heats in the liquid.
Milk or cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Gradually add the hot milk. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring lets the flour and butter mixture hydrate and thicken evenly. Dumping in all the milk at once can trap clumps of flour that stay lumpy.

“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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