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Cream Toast

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

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the flour and salt, stirring well.

  2. Gradually add the boiling milk, cooking until smooth while stirring continuously.

  3. Stir in half of the cream and heat the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks with the remaining cream.

  2. Pour the hot sauce over the egg yolk mixture.

  3. Pour everything over the buttered toast in a 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. 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that coats the toast.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and thicken it gently when combined with the hot sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the sauce.
Butter
Provides fat and flavour for the roux base and the buttered toast.

The step that matters

Pour the hot sauce over the egg yolk mixture. Adding hot sauce to yolks too quickly can scramble them. Pouring gradually while whisking tempers the yolks so the sauce turns smooth and creamy rather than lumpy.

“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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