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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a savory sauce made from soaked stale bread, milk, pepper, salt, butter, and optional currants.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Soak the grated stale bread in enough milk to cover it for about 45 minutes until incorporated.

  2. Add black pepper, salt, and butter to the soaked bread mixture.

  3. Pour in a little more milk and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve in a sauceboat with roast wild fowl or roast pig.

  2. For a variation, boil in a handful of dried currants instead of pepper.

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. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaks up milk and swells, thickening the sauce and giving it body.
Milk
Softens the bread and forms the liquid base that turns into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel.
Black pepper
Adds a mild, aromatic warmth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bringing the sauce to a boil. Bread starch thickens as it heats and can scorch or stick to the base of the pan. Stirring while it comes to a boil keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, corn, pepper, butter, walnut):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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