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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from milk, butter, onion, and bread crumbs, served hot with poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 the crumbs

  1. Dry stale bread in a warm oven until it crumbles easily.

  2. Crush the bread lightly with a rolling pin, leaving some coarse crumbs.

  3. Measure out ½ cup of crumbs and sift the fine crumbs into a double boiler with the milk and onion.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook on the stove for 30 minutes, then remove the onion.

  2. Stir in salt, pepper, and ½ tablespoon of butter.

  3. In a frying pan, heat the remaining butter and add the coarse crumbs, stirring until brown and crisp.

Serve

  1. Spread the sauce on a warm dish, place the bird or fowl on top, sprinkle with crumbs, and garnish with parsley.

  2. Serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 that the crumbs soak up and thicken into a sauce.
Dried bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and swell, thickening the sauce to a smooth, spoonable body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and browns the coarse crumbs for a crisp, toasty topping.
Onion
Gives aroma as it steeps in the milk, then is removed before serving.

The step that matters

Stirring the coarse crumbs while they fry in butter. The crumbs brown quickly in hot butter, and they can go from golden to burnt and bitter within moments. Constant stirring keeps the browning even and stops them from scorching, so they turn crisp rather than dark and acrid.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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