Skip to main content
Main

Milk Toast

Milk Toast is a simple dish of toasted bread soaked in a warm milk and butter mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the milk sauce

  1. In a pot, heat 1 quart of milk over medium heat.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of cold butter to the milk.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix 2 teaspoons of flour with ½ cup of cold milk until smooth.

  4. Once the milk boils, stir in the flour mixture and add 1 teaspoon of salt.

  5. Allow the mixture to boil briefly, then remove from heat.

Serve

  1. Dip slices of toasted bread into the milk mixture until soaked.

  2. Pour any remaining milk over the toast, cover, and 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. 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 that soaks into the toast.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce when stirred in and boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour mixture. Flour must be fully smooth before it goes into the milk, and the milk should be boiling as it is added. Stirring constantly keeps lumps from forming, because starch granules clump when they hit hot liquid unevenly.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes