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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made by soaking bread in milk, onion, nutmeg, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

  1. Trim the crusts off the bread and crumble it finely.

  2. Add the crumbled bread to the milk in a saucepan.

  3. Stir in the grated onion and a little nutmeg.

Cook and finish

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to avoid lumps.

  2. Once cooked, add butter to taste, but do not add salt before cooking.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Bread
Thickens the milk as its starch absorbs liquid, giving the sauce body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread softens into and thickens.
Onion
Adds savoury flavour to the sauce as it infuses into the milk.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring to avoid lumps. Bread starch thickens the milk as it heats, but if the mixture sits unstirred, the crumbs can clump and stick to the base of the pan. Constant stirring keeps the crumbs dispersed so the sauce turns smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, nutmeg, 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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