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Sauce

Bread Sauce for Birds

A sauce made from grated bread crumbs, sliced onions, white peppercorn, mace, cream or melted butter, simmered until thin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Jacqueline Harrison Smith (ed.) · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,672 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Also mentioned in the method: butter, cream

Directions

  1. Combine one cup grated bread crumbs, two sliced onions, white peppercorn, and mace, then simmer.

  2. Take out onion.

  3. Add cream or melted butter until thin as gravy.

By Jacqueline Harrison Smith (ed.). Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Bread + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,672 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and swell, thickening the sauce to a smooth, soft body.
Onions
Release their flavour and sweetness into the liquid as they simmer, flavouring the sauce.

The step that matters

Add cream or melted butter until thin as gravy. Bread crumbs keep absorbing liquid and thickening as they stand, so adding the cream or butter gradually lets you stop at the right consistency instead of overshooting into a stiff paste.

“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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