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To Make Milk Toast

Milk toast is bread toasted in a butter, flour, water, and milk mixture.

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

To Make Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a tin toast-pan.

  2. Sprinkle flour over the butter and mix it in with a spoon.

  3. Pour boiling water into the pan while stirring continuously.

  4. Add the milk or cream and stir until it comes to a boil.

Assemble

  1. Toast the bread until light brown.

  2. Dip each piece in the hot mixture one at a time and layer the dipped bread in a dish.

  3. Pour the remaining mixture over the top.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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 richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Milk or cream
Forms the creamy base of the sauce and adds moisture and softness.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the butter while adding the boiling water. Flour must be fully combined with the melted butter and stirred constantly as hot liquid goes in, otherwise lumps form and the sauce thickens unevenly.

“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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