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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from milk, dried bread crumbs, onion, butter, salt, and pepper, served 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. Use stale bread and dry it in a warm oven until it crumbles easily.

  2. Crush the dried bread lightly with a rolling pin, aiming for coarse crumbs.

  3. Measure out ½ cup of crumbs and sift the fine crumbs through a flour sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, combine the fine crumbs, milk, and onion. Cook for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the onion and stir in the salt, pepper, and ½ tablespoon of butter.

Finish and serve

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

  2. Spread the sauce on a warm dish, place the bird or fowl on top, and sprinkle with the crispy crumbs.

  3. Garnish with parsley and serve 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 swell in, giving the sauce its body and creaminess.
Dried bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and swell, thickening the milk into a smooth, soft sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavor, and browns the coarse crumbs for crunch.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savory aroma during cooking before being removed.

The step that matters

Browning the coarse crumbs. Coarse crumbs in hot butter go from golden to burnt within moments. Stirring constantly and stopping once they are brown and crisp keeps the topping crunchy and free of bitterness.

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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