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Water Toast

A sauce of water, flour, butter, and salt poured over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Water Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil 1 pint of water.

  2. In a bowl, smooth the flour with a little cold water.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling water until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the butter and stir until melted.

  2. Stir in the salt and pour the mixture over the toast.

  3. Serve hot in a covered dish.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the boiling water into a smooth, lightly thickened liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the liquid a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Smoothing the flour in cold water first. Flour added directly to boiling water clumps as its starch grains swell unevenly on the outside. Mixing it smooth with cold water first lets the grains disperse evenly, so the mixture thickens without lumps.

“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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