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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a dish of browned toast soaked in a milk, butter, flour, and salt cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a small bowl, mix the flour with a little cold milk to create a smooth paste.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling milk and stir until it thickens.

  4. Stir in the butter until it melts.

  5. Add the salt.

Soak and serve

  1. Dip each slice of browned toast into the cream mixture one by one until well soaked.

  2. Place the soaked toast in a dish, pour the remaining cream over it, cover, and serve 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. 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 cream that soaks into the toast.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, coating cream as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture to the cream.
Browned toast
Absorbs the cream, giving a soft interior with a toasted flavour.

The step that matters

Mix the flour into cold milk before adding it to the boiling milk. Flour dropped straight into hot liquid clumps because its starch grains swell on the outside first. Dispersing it in cold milk first lets the starch spread evenly, so the cream thickens smooth rather than 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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