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Dessert

Apricot Toast

A toast made from milk loaf, topped with apricots in a white wine syrup and served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Apricot Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apricots and syrup

  1. Halve and stone the apricots.

  2. Boil the sugar and water for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the syrup.

  4. Add the apricot pieces to the syrup. Add the white wine to the syrup. Simmer for a few minutes.

Fry the bread

  1. Cut rounds from the milk loaf slightly larger than the apricots.

  2. Fry the rounds in fresh butter until pale yellow. Drain the fried rounds.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the rounds in a circle on a dish with the concave side up.

  2. Place an apricot piece on each round. Put a kernel in the center of each apricot. Pour the syrup over the apricots.

  3. Serve with whipped cream in the center.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. White wine + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe apricots
Provide the main fruit flavor and soft texture of the topping.
White sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it thicken as it boils down.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the apricot syrup.
Milk loaf
Forms the soft base that soaks up the syrup.
Fresh butter
Fries the bread rounds, adding fat, richness and light golden color.
Whipped cream
Adds cool, rich creaminess that contrasts with the warm fruit.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar and water for 2 hours. A long boil concentrates the sugar and water into a thick syrup. Stopping early leaves it thin, so it will not coat the fruit or soak the bread well.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, white wine, milk, butter, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, white wine, milk, butter, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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