Skip to main content
Sauce

Bread Sauce

A sauce made from bread crumbs, meat broth, onion, spices, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put the bread crumbs in a small saucepan.

  2. Add enough liquid from boiled meat or poultry to moisten the crumbs and let them soak.

  3. Add the parboiled onion, salt, mace, and peppercorns.

  4. Beat the mixture until smooth and stiff, then remove the onion and peppercorns.

  5. Stir in the cream and add a pinch of cayenne if desired.

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

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

  2. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Tea + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Bread crumbs
Thicken the liquid and give the sauce its body as they soak and swell.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Beating the mixture until smooth and stiff. Beating breaks down the soaked crumbs so they blend into an even, smooth texture. If the crumbs are left lumpy, the sauce will feel grainy rather than velvety.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, bread, meat, onion, cream, 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.

More bread sauce recipes

Eggs in 3 See all 282 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes