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Bread Sauce

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

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

Prepare the infusion

  1. Peel and slice the onion.

  2. Simmer the onion in the milk until tender.

Soak the bread

  1. Break the stale bread into small pieces in a saucepan.

  2. Strain the hot milk over the bread and remove the onion.

  3. Cover and soak for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the mixture smooth with a fork.

  2. Add cayenne, salt, and butter.

  3. 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

Stale bread
Its dry, porous crumb absorbs the hot milk and swells, thickening the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, and its proteins and sugars help the sauce thicken and turn smooth when heated.
Onion
Simmered in the milk, it releases aroma and flavour into the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the texture and gives the sauce a rounded, glossy mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture smooth with a fork. Soaked bread can stay in lumps; breaking up the softened crumb evenly gives the sauce a smooth, uniform texture rather than a grainy one.

Swap the onion

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

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

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