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Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling milk with stale bread crumbs, peppercorns, onion, butter, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add the stale bread crumbs and let them boil in the milk.

  3. Add the peppercorns and the whole onion to the saucepan.

  4. Place the saucepan beside the fire to allow the bread crumbs to swell.

  5. Once thickened, remove the onion, add butter, and stir well.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, optionally adding cream for extra richness.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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 to thicken the sauce into a smooth body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs soak up and thicken.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounder, silkier mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Cream
Adds fat and richness when included as an optional finish.

The step that matters

Letting the crumbs swell. Bread crumbs thicken the sauce only as they absorb the hot milk over time. Rushing this stage leaves the sauce thin and grainy, so let the crumbs soften fully before serving.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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