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Bread

Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a gravy thickened with stale bread crumbs and seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skim the fat from the gravy left in the dripping-pan.

  2. Wet the stale bread crumbs with hot water.

Make the sauce

  1. Bring the gravy to a boil and thicken it with the wet bread crumbs.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and a pinch of mace.

  3. Boil all together once 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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + macetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,005 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Pepper and mace 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

Stale bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and swell, thickening the gravy into a smooth, body-rich sauce.
Gravy from the dripping-pan
Provides the savoury base and meaty flavour the whole sauce is built on.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note that rounds out the savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Thickening with the wet bread crumbs. Crumbs added to boiling gravy can clump if not stirred in well. Wetting them first and mixing them in evenly lets the starch swell smoothly, giving an even, lump-free thickness.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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