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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, bread crumbs, onion, peppercorns, mace, cayenne, salt, butter, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Simmer the sliced onion and peppercorns in the milk over boiling water until the onion is soft.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the bread crumbs and cover for 1 hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. Beat the mixture smooth.

  2. Add mace, cayenne, salt, and butter rubbed in with a little flour.

  3. Add enough sweet cream to achieve the desired consistency.

  4. Boil for a few minutes until thin enough to pour.

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. Butter + creamtop 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the seasoned milk and thicken the sauce into a smooth, body-rich texture.
Milk
Carries the onion and peppercorn flavours and forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Coats the butter so it blends in smoothly and helps thicken the sauce.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and lets the cook adjust the sauce to the desired thickness.

The step that matters

Boiling until thin enough to pour. Bread crumbs keep absorbing liquid and thickening as the sauce stands, so boiling must stop once it pours easily. Over-boiling makes it stiff and pasty, and it thickens further as it cools.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

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