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Cream Toast

A toast topped with a creamy milk and flour sauce, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Add the butter and stir until melted.

  3. In a bowl, mix the flour smoothly with the cream.

  4. Gradually add some boiling milk to the flour mixture, stirring to prevent lumps.

  5. Pour the flour mixture back into the boiling milk and cook for a few moments.

  6. Add salt to taste.

  7. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg.

Serve

  1. Strain the mixture over lightly buttered toast.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 carries the flavour of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the milk and cream into a smooth, lump-free sauce as it heats.
Egg
Adds richness and gently thickens the sauce when stirred in off the heat.
Rich cream
Adds fat and body, giving the sauce a smoother, silkier texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, rounding out the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour mixture gradually and cook briefly. Adding the flour-cream paste to boiling milk slowly, while stirring, keeps starch dispersed so lumps do not form. Removing from heat before adding the egg prevents it from scrambling and curdling in the hot sauce.

“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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