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Cream Toast

A toasted bread dish topped with a creamy milk and egg white mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the toast

  1. Toast the bread until golden brown.

  2. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a dish with 4 cups boiling water.

  3. Dip each slice of toasted bread in the melted butter for a second and place in a deep heated dish.

Make the cream

  1. Scald the milk until hot but not boiling.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour and simmer until cooked.

  3. Add the remaining butter and the beaten egg whites, then bring to a boil.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture over the toast, lifting the slices to allow the cream to run between them.

  2. Cover closely and set in a 350°F (175°C) oven for a few moments before serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up butter and cream, giving the dish its body.
Milk
Serves as the liquid base of the cream sauce.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk as its starch swells during simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the toast and the cream.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff, they add lightness and airy texture to the cream.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour should be blended smoothly into the hot milk and simmered until cooked. Raw flour left unheated tastes pasty, and unevenly mixed flour forms lumps. Simmering swells the starch granules, which thickens the cream and cooks off the raw floury taste.

“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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