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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from stale bread, milk, onion, butter, salt, and cayenne pepper.

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

Prepare

  1. Place the broken roll pieces in a basin and pour boiling milk over them.

  2. Beat the mixture well with a wooden spoon.

  3. Add the chopped onion and mix thoroughly.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the bread mixture.

  2. Stir in salt and cayenne pepper, cooking for a couple of minutes.

  3. If needed, thin the sauce with a little more milk.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Milk + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale french roll
Soaked in milk, the bread thickens the sauce and gives it a soft, smooth body.
Boiling milk
Softens the bread and forms the liquid base that thickens into the sauce.
Roasted onion
Adds sweetness and savoury depth as its flavour mellows into the milk.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the bread mixture and cooking it briefly. Adding the soaked bread to hot butter and cooking it for a couple of minutes lets the starch thicken the sauce evenly. Skipping this heat can leave it thin or lumpy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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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