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Bread Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Hamilton, Margaret · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,346 recipes. Both carry sabinene, which smells woody, terpenic. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer 1 pint of milk with a blade of mace.

  2. Add a small onion, 2 oz. butter, 2 oz. bread crumbs, 1 teaspoonful salt, and 10 peppercorns.

  3. Simmer the mixture for twenty minutes.

  4. Strain over the bread crumbs and butter.

  5. Return to pan and let it thicken, but do not boil.

  6. Add a glass of sherry to improve the sauce.

By Hamilton, Margaret. 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. See the original page.

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. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs (in the method)
Absorb the infused milk and thicken the sauce into a soft, spoonable texture.
Butter (in the method)
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that is infused and then thickened into the sauce.

The step that matters

Return to pan and let it thicken, but do not boil. Milk thickened by starch can scorch or curdle and turn grainy if it boils hard, so gentle heat lets the crumbs swell smoothly into a velvety sauce.

“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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