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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a milk-based sauce with breadcrumbs, onion, butter, peppercorns, mace, and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer the onion, peppercorns, and mace in the milk until well flavored.

  2. Strain the mixture, then add the breadcrumbs and butter.

  3. Season to taste and cook gently for about 5 minutes until the breadcrumbs have absorbed the milk.

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

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

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Breadcrumbs
Thicken the milk as they absorb it, giving the sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavors and becomes the thickened sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Releases savory flavor into the milk during simmering, then is strained out.

The step that matters

Cook gently after adding the breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs thicken the milk as their starch absorbs liquid and swells. Cooking too hard can scorch the milk on the base of the pan or make the sauce gluey, so gentle heat lets the crumbs hydrate evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, butter. 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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