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Cream or Milk Toast

A toast dipped in a lightly thickened cream or milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 or Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Boil the cream or milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with the cold milk until smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling cream, stirring steadily.

  4. Add salt and butter (if using milk) and mix well.

Toast and serve

  1. Toast the stale bread slices until evenly brown on both sides.

  2. Dip the toasted bread into the cream for half a minute.

  3. Place the dipped bread in a hot dish and pour the remaining cream over it.

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. Butter + breadtop 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. 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

Cream or milk
Forms the liquid base and, once thickened, the rich, smooth sauce that coats the bread.
Flour
Thickens the boiling cream so it becomes a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Stale bread slices
Act as the absorbent base that soaks up the thickened cream.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavour and a smoother mouthfeel in the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling cream. Stirring steadily while adding the flour paste keeps it dispersed so it thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps. Flour needs to be mixed in evenly so its starch can gelatinise throughout the liquid.

“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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