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Bread Sauce, for Game

A sauce made from milk, bread crumbs, onion, butter, salt, and pepper, served with roast 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, for Game

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Dry the bread in a warm oven, then roll it into coarse crumbs.

  2. Sift the crumbs to separate the fine crumbs, which should yield about ⅓ cup.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk and onion, and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the fine crumbs and boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon of butter and season with salt and pepper, then remove the onion.

Fry and serve

  1. In a separate pan, heat 1 tablespoon of butter until very hot, then fry the coarse crumbs until light brown, stirring for 2 minutes without burning.

  2. Cover the breast of the roast birds with the fried crumbs and serve the sauce around the birds or in a gravy dish.

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, and its proteins help it thicken as the crumbs absorb it.
Dried bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and swell, thickening the sauce to a smooth, soft body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel, and browns to a nutty flavour when the coarse crumbs are fried.
Onion
Infuses the milk with a savoury aroma, then is removed before serving.

The step that matters

Frying the coarse crumbs. Butter that is very hot browns the crumbs quickly through the Maillard reaction, but the crumbs can scorch if left too long, turning bitter. Stirring keeps them an even light brown.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, 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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