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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a creamy accompaniment made from crumbled brown bread, water, pepper, sea salt, and stewed tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Crumble the brown bread into small pieces.

  2. Cover the bread with water and boil until smooth.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Stir in half the quantity of stewed tomatoes.

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. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  2. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brown bread
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, body-filled texture as it breaks down in boiling water.
Stewed tomatoes
Adds acidity, moisture and colour, balancing the starchy bread.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatothe original
  3. Spinachfits less well
  4. Carrotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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