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Savoury Toast

Savory toast made with a butter, egg yolk, Harvey sauce, milk, meat, and spices mixture spread on toast and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Savoury Toast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the topping

  1. Mix the butter, egg yolk, Harvey sauce, and milk together.

  2. Add the meat and seasonings, stirring to a smooth paste.

Bake and serve

  1. Spread the mixture on neatly cut pieces of dry toast.

  2. Place in a 400°F (200°C) oven for a few minutes to slightly brown.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Egg yolk
Binds the butter and meat into a smooth, spreadable paste.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the topping stay moist and spread smoothly.
Chicken or meat
Provides the savory body of the topping.
Milk
Loosens the mixture so it spreads easily over the toast.

The step that matters

Baking the topping. Only a few minutes in the oven is needed to lightly brown the surface. Longer heat dries the egg and butter mixture and can toughen it, so watch it closely.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, chicken, milk, egg, butter):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, chicken, milk, egg, butter. 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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