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Milk Toast

Milk Toast is stale bread dipped in a boiled milk and flour mixture with butter and salt.

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

Make the milk sauce

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk in a pot.

  2. In a bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of flour with ½ cup of cold milk.

  3. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk and let it boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 teaspoon of salt to the mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Toast the stale bread carefully.

  2. Dip the toasted bread into the milk mixture and serve.

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. Flour + buttertop 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).

Flour and butter 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 gives it a soft, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Stale bread
Acts as the absorbent base that soaks up the thickened milk sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Mixing flour into cold milk first keeps it from clumping. Adding it to boiling milk while stirring lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce 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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