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Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling milk with onion, thickened with bread crumbs, flavored with butter, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with the onion for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove the onion and thicken the milk with the sifted bread crumbs.

  3. Flavor the sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Brown the crumbs and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the coarser bread crumbs, stirring until light brown.

  2. Serve with game, adding a spoonful of the sauce and browned crumbs.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs thicken into a sauce.
Sifted bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and thicken the sauce to a smooth, soft body.
Coarser bread crumbs
Toasted in butter to add a nutty browned flavor and a bit of texture.
Butter
Carries heat for browning the crumbs and adds richness.

The step that matters

Browning the coarser crumbs. Stir the crumbs in melted butter over moderate heat until light brown. Browning builds nutty flavor through the Maillard reaction, but crumbs left too long over high heat scorch and turn bitter.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, pepper, nutmeg. 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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