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Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a dish of buttered toast topped with a creamy sauce of milk, cream, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and salt, mixing well.

  3. Pour in the boiling milk and cook until smooth, stirring constantly.

  4. Add half of the cream to the sauce to heat.

  5. Pour the boiling sauce over the beaten egg yolks mixed with the remaining cream.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce over the buttered toast in a very hot deep dish.

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. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and add richness when gently combined with the hot sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the sauce and toast.

The step that matters

Pour the boiling sauce over the egg yolks. Adding hot sauce to beaten yolks too quickly can scramble them. Stirring the sauce in gradually while whisking the yolks keeps the mixture smooth and thickened.

“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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