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Bread Sauce Another

A sauce made by soaking bread crumbs in milk, then cooking with butter, salt, mace, cloves, peppercorns, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove 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 Another

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the soaked bread, butter, salt, mace, cloves, peppercorns, and chopped onion.

  2. Cook slowly until the mixture is smooth and has the consistency of drawn butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with plain boiled fish.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Clove + oniontop 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and swell, thickening the sauce as its starch sets during cooking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread softens in and cooks into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the finished sauce a smooth, rich texture.
Ground mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic flavour that carries through the cooked sauce.
Chopped onion
Adds savoury aroma and flavour as it softens in the warm milk.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until smooth. Low, gentle heat lets the bread starch swell and thicken evenly while the milk heats without scorching or turning lumpy. Stirring keeps the bread from sticking to the pan and burning.

Swap the mace

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

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

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