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Bread Sauce

A savory sauce made from stale bread crumbs, onion, butter, milk, pepper, salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Soak and flavour

  1. Boil the chopped onion in milk until soft.

  2. Strain the milk over the stale bread crumbs and let it sit for 1 hour.

Make and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the soaked bread crumbs, boiled onion, pepper, salt, and mace.

  2. Bring to a boil and serve in a sauce tureen.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Onion + buttertop 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

Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and swell, thickening the sauce to a smooth, spoonable body.
Milk
Liquid that softens the crumbs and forms the body of the sauce.
Onion
Gives a mild, savoury aroma that flavours the milk as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil. Milk scorches and boils over easily, and bread crumbs keep thickening as they heat. Bring the sauce up gently and stir so it does not stick to the pan or turn too thick.

Swap the mace

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

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

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