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Bread Sauce for Partridges

A creamy sauce made from milk, stale bread crumbs, butter, onion, pepper, salt, and mace, served with partridges.

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 for Partridges

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Chop the onion and boil it in milk until soft.

  2. Strain the milk into a bowl with stale bread crumbs.

  3. Let the mixture sit for one hour.

Finish and serve

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

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. 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. 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 crumbs
Absorb the milk and swell, thickening the sauce into a soft, smooth body.
Milk
Carries the onion flavour and hydrates the bread crumbs to form the sauce base.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich mouthfeel and a silky finish to the sauce.
Onion
Releases mild sweetness and savoury flavour into the milk as it simmers.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Bread starch needs to be heated fully to swell and thicken the sauce evenly. Boiling too hard or too long can scorch the milk on the pan base or make the sauce stick and turn grainy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, 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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