Skip to main content
Main

Cream Tomato Toast

A toast topped with a creamy tomato sauce made from stewed tomatoes, butter, sugar, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cream Tomato Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the tomatoes until well done.

  2. Season with salt, butter, pepper, and sugar.

  3. Make a thickening with flour and cream.

Serve

  1. Pour the tomato sauce over the toast and serve.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Tomatoes
Form the sauce base and supply acidity and body as they break down.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Its starch thickens the sauce when heated with the liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture, and helps form the thickening.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes for a rounder flavor.

The step that matters

Make a thickening with flour and cream. Flour clumps if it is added to hot liquid without first being blended smoothly into the cream. Starch thickens only when heated, so the mixture must be stirred and cooked until it visibly thickens before it is combined with the tomato sauce.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sugar, flour, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, flour, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes