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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is toasted bread topped with a hot milk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Milk Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter a cold saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour in the milk and bring it to a boil.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in the cold cream and stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the salt and sugar, and cook for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the toasted bread slices.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Corn + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together547 recipes

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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.
Cold cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats in the liquid.
Bread
Absorbs the sauce, giving the dish its structure and substance.

The step that matters

Stirring the corn starch into the boiling milk. Corn starch clumps if it is added undispersed, so it must be fully dissolved in the cold cream first. Once heated, the starch granules swell and gelatinise, which is what thickens the sauce; cooking it briefly makes sure this happens.

“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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