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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is a simple dish of toasted bread topped with a thickened milk mixture.

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 ↓

Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast several slices of bread until golden brown.

  2. Heat 4 cups of milk with 2 tablespoons of butter and ¼ teaspoon of salt in a saucepan until it boils.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix 2 tablespoons of flour with a little milk to make a smooth paste.

  2. Stir the paste into the boiling milk.

  3. Let the mixture boil for a moment.

  4. Stir in 1 beaten egg.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened milk mixture over the toasted bread on a platter.

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. Milk + breadtop 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. Egg + breadtop 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the flavour of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when boiled.
Egg
Adds richness and further thickens the sauce when stirred into the hot mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and a rich, savoury flavour to the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the boiling milk. Flour lumps form if it is added to hot liquid without first being smoothed into a paste with cold or warm milk. Stirring while adding it spreads the starch evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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