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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a creamy sauce made from onion, milk, bread, butter, mace, cayenne pepper, and salt.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Peel and quarter the onion.

  2. Simmer the onion in the milk until tender.

Soak the bread

  1. Break the bread into small pieces and place in a clean saucepan.

  2. Strain the milk over the bread and cover with a lid.

  3. Let it soak for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the mixture until smooth, adding mace, cayenne, salt, and butter.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil 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. 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

Bread
Soaks up the warm milk and thickens the sauce into a soft, smooth body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread absorbs and carries the onion flavour.
Onion
Infuses the milk with its savoury, mellow flavour during simmering.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the finished sauce a rich mouthfeel and smoothness.

The step that matters

Bringing the mixture to a boil. Milk scorches and sticks easily on the bottom of a pan, and it can curdle if overheated. Keep the heat moderate and stir so the sauce thickens smoothly without burning.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, 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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