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Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling onion with black pepper in milk, then adding grated stale bread, butter, flour, salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Infuse the milk

  1. Quarter and boil the onion with black pepper in milk until the onion is soft.

  2. Strain the milk over the grated stale bread and let it sit for an hour.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the soaked bread, boiled onion, butter, flour, pepper, salt, and mace.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and serve in a sauce tureen.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 that carries the flavors and thickens into a sauce.
Stale white bread
Soaks up the flavored milk and thickens the sauce as its starches swell.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness as it softens and releases flavor into the milk.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with the butter and liquid when heated.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. The flour and bread starches need heat to swell and thicken the sauce fully. Stirring while it heats helps prevent lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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