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White Sauce Eor Game

A creamy white sauce made with milk, onion, bread crumbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

White Sauce Eor Game

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the onion in the milk until it thickens like jelly.

  2. Strain the mixture and return the milk to the heat.

  3. Stir in enough sifted bread crumbs to thicken the sauce to a creamy consistency. Beat the mixture while boiling.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and a little nutmeg.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 of the sauce that the bread crumbs thicken.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and swell as they cook, thickening the sauce to a creamy texture.
Onion
Infuses the milk with its flavour as it boils, then is removed by straining.

The step that matters

Stir in the bread crumbs gradually. Starch in bread crumbs swells when heated in liquid. Adding too many at once can make the sauce thick and lumpy, so add them a little at a time while beating the mixture as it boils.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Potatobetter flavor fit
  3. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, pepper, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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