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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, breadcrumbs, butter, onion, peppercorns, mace, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Cook gently until the breadcrumbs have absorbed the milk.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  5. Add cream to enrich, if desired.

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

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Breadcrumbs
Absorb the infused milk and thicken it into a soft, spoonable sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that is infused with flavor and thickened by the breadcrumbs.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rounded mouthfeel and richer flavor.
Cream
Enriches the sauce with fat for a silkier, more luxurious texture.

The step that matters

Cook gently until the breadcrumbs have absorbed the milk. High heat or vigorous boiling can scorch the milk on the pan base and make the sauce catch or taste burnt. Gentle heat lets the crumbs swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly without lumps or sticking.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

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