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Bread Sauce for Partridges

A savory sauce made from onion, milk, stale bread crumbs, butter, 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

Prepare the onion and milk

  1. Chop the onion.

  2. Boil the onion in the milk until soft.

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

Soak and finish

  1. Let the mixture sit for one hour.

  2. Combine the bread mixture with the butter, pepper, salt, mace, and boiled onion in a saucepan.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. 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 infused milk and thicken the sauce into a soft, spoonable body.
Milk
Carries the onion flavour and forms the liquid base that the crumbs soak up.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savoury, sweet aromatic flavour as it simmers.

The step that matters

Straining the milk over the crumbs. Pressing or leaving too much onion solids in the milk can make the sauce gritty or uneven. Straining keeps the texture smooth while the crumbs soak up the flavoured milk.

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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