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Sauce

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, bread crumbs, onion, butter, and cream, served with roast fowl or game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 in a saucepan.

  2. Add the bread crumbs, salt, onion, and butter.

  3. Cook gently for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove the onion.

  5. Whisk the sauce until smooth.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the cream.

  2. Serve with roast fowl or game.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk and give the sauce its body as they swell and soften.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the crumbs absorb and cook into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Whisk the sauce until smooth. Bread crumbs can clump as they absorb the hot milk. Whisking breaks up lumps and helps the starch and crumb fully hydrate into an even, smooth sauce.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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