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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is toasted bread topped with a warm milk and corn starch mixture.

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 ↓

Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the desired amount of bread.

  2. Boil 1 quart of milk.

  3. When nearly boiling, mix 1 tablespoon of corn starch with a little milk to make a thin paste.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the corn starch paste into the boiling milk along with the butter and salt.

Serve

  1. Arrange the toasted bread in a dish, pouring some of the milk mixture over each piece without dipping the bread.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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 moistens the toast.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a light sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Bread
Provides the base that soaks up the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the corn starch paste into the milk. Corn starch clumps if added as dry powder or to very hot liquid without first being dispersed in cold or warm liquid. Mixing it into a thin paste first lets the starch granules separate evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when stirred into the boiling milk.

“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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