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Sauce

Bread Sauce for Game or Poultry

A creamy sauce made from milk, onion, bread crumbs, butter, and seasonings, served with game or poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 for Game or Poultry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with the onion until it is strongly flavored.

  2. Strain the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs and butter.

  3. Season with salt, red pepper, and add the whole black peppers.

  4. Bring to a boil, then let it stand for an hour before serving.

Make ahead

  1. This sauce can be made a day in advance and reheated.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  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

Milk
Provides the liquid base that the bread crumbs soak up and swell into a thick sauce.
Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk as they absorb it, giving the sauce its body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savoury, aromatic flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the milk with the onion until strongly flavored. Milk takes on flavour slowly and scorches easily when boiling, so it needs gentle attention. Letting the sauce stand after bringing it to a boil lets the crumbs fully absorb the liquid and the flavours blend.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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