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Bread Sauce for Game

A white sauce made with milk, bread crumbs, onion, spices, and butter, served with game.

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 Game

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the milk over low heat.

  2. Add the grated onion, cayenne pepper, coarse sea salt, and nutmeg or mace.

  3. Bring to a boil very slowly for 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in half of the bread crumbs.

Fry the crumbs and serve

  1. In a separate pan, fry the remaining bread crumbs in butter until dry and golden brown.

  2. Once the game is served, sprinkle the fried bread crumbs over it.

  3. Serve the white sauce on the side or place a tablespoonful on each plate.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk into a sauce, and the fried portion adds crisp, browned texture on top.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs soak up and thicken.
Butter
Fat that fries the reserved bread crumbs to a golden, crisp finish.
Grated onion
Adds savoury aroma and flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil very slowly for 5 minutes. Milk scorches and can stick or boil over quickly, so gentle heat keeps it from burning while the crumbs swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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