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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from bread crumbs, onion, cream butter sauce, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Prepare

  1. Remove the hard crusts from the bread and break it into fine crumbs to make a heaping cupful.

  2. Boil the onion until soft.

Make the sauce

  1. Prepare a cream butter sauce, omitting the flour or thickening.

  2. Finely chop the boiled onion and stir it into the boiling sauce.

  3. Gradually add the bread crumbs, one spoonful at a time, until the sauce thickens to a pourable consistency.

  4. Season with a sprinkle of pepper.

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

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

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

White bread crumbs
Thicken the sauce as they absorb liquid and swell, giving it a soft, pourable body.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavour to the sauce once boiled and finely chopped into it.
Cream butter sauce
Provides the rich, creamy liquid base that the bread crumbs thicken.

The step that matters

Adding the bread crumbs. Adding crumbs all at once can make the sauce lumpy or stiff. Adding them gradually, while the sauce is boiling, lets the starch in the crumbs hydrate evenly and reach a smooth, pourable thickness.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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