Skip to main content
Main

Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling milk with onion, cloves, mace, peppercorns, and salt, then straining over bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine cold milk, onion, cloves, mace, peppercorns, and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil, then strain the milk over the bread crumbs in a bowl.

  3. Stir the mixture over the heat for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with a small pat of butter or a tablespoon of cream.

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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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 the bread crumbs soak up and thicken into a sauce.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the infused milk and swell, giving the sauce its thick, smooth body.
Butter or cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring over the heat after the crumbs are added. Bread crumbs thicken as their starch absorbs liquid and swells. Stirring over gentle heat for a few minutes distributes the crumbs evenly and keeps them from settling and scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would leave lumps or a burnt taste.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, clove, bread, 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.

More bread sauce recipes

Eggs in 3 See all 282 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes