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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from bread, milk, cream, shallot, cloves, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tear the bread into small pieces and place it in a saucepan.

  2. Pour the milk over the bread.

  3. Add the shallot with the cloves stuck into it.

Cook and finish

  1. Cook slowly for about 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the shallot and beat the mixture until creamy.

  3. Stir in the cream, pepper, and salt.

  4. Reheat and serve.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  5. Bread + shallottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

White bread
Soaks up milk and thickens the sauce as it cooks down.
Milk
Liquid that softens the bread and forms the body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel at the end.
Shallot or small onion
Gives a mild savoury flavour to the milk as it infuses.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for about 20 minutes. Gentle heat lets the bread absorb the milk and soften fully without scorching on the base of the pan, which would give a burnt taste. Stirring keeps the starch from sticking and clumping as it thickens.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, cream, clove, 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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