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Cream' Toast for an Invalid

A toast topped with a creamy tomato mixture made from milk, butter, flour, and tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 for an Invalid

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Toast the bread slices and remove the crusts.

Make the sauce

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Thicken the melted butter with a little flour.

  3. Heat the cooked tomatoes.

  4. Season the heated tomatoes with salt.

  5. Add a pinch of baking soda to the tomatoes.

  6. Combine the tomatoes with the scalded milk.

  7. Strain the tomato-milk mixture over the toast.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately while very 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. 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 + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Rich milk
Provides the creamy base and body of the sauce.
Cooked tomatoes
Supply the tomato flavour and acidity that contrast with the milk.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture so the sauce holds its body.
Baking soda
Neutralises some of the tomato acidity, softening its sharpness.

The step that matters

Combine the tomatoes with the scalded milk. Acidic tomatoes can curdle hot milk. Adding the tomatoes to the milk, with the baking soda already in the tomatoes, and serving at once helps keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, butter, flour):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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