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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a dish of stale bread soaked in a hot milk, butter, and egg white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Cut off the crusts from the bread.

  2. Dip each slice in a saucepan of salted boiling water.

  3. Stack the dipped toast in a deep covered dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk until scalding, then add the butter.

  2. Once the butter is melted, stir in the beaten egg whites.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the toast, lifting the lower slices to soak.

  2. Cover and keep hot for 5 minutes 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stale baker's bread
Its dry, firm crumb soaks up the sauce without collapsing, giving the dish its body.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, supplying moisture and a soft, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel and flavor.
Egg whites
Coagulate with gentle heat, thickening the sauce and giving it a light, set texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg whites over gentle heat. Egg white proteins set when heated, so adding them to very hot sauce too fast can cause lumps or a grainy texture. Keeping the sauce hot but not boiling lets them thicken it 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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