Skip to main content
Main

Cream Toast

Cream Toast is a light bread served with a warm milk and cream sauce thickened with arrowroot or cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cream Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk and cream until just boiling.

  2. Add the butter and arrowroot (or cornstarch) mixed with a little cold milk, and season with salt.

  3. Let the mixture boil for a few minutes.

Toast and serve

  1. Toast the slices of bread until evenly browned, then scrape off any burnt bits.

  2. Dip one or two slices of toast into the sauce until softened, then place in a warm covered dish.

  3. Pour a little sauce over each layer of toast and serve immediately.

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Arrowroot + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot or cornstarch
Thickens the milk and cream into a smooth, pourable sauce.
Milk and cream
Form the liquid base of the sauce and give it richness.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder flavour and silkier sauce texture.
Light bread
Soaks up the sauce, becoming soft while the toast keeps some structure.

The step that matters

Mixing the thickener into cold milk before adding it. Starch clumps if added directly to hot liquid. Mixing it into a little cold milk first lets it disperse evenly, so it thickens smoothly when the sauce boils.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, butter, bread. 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.

More cream toast recipes

Cheese 6Tomato 5 See all 93 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes