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Bread Sauce

A sauce made by simmering sliced French roll, peppercorns, onion, salt, and milk, then thickening with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, combine the sliced French roll, peppercorns, whole onion, salt, and boiling milk to cover the bread.

  2. Simmer gently by the side of the fire until the bread soaks up the milk.

  3. Remove the onion and add a little thick cream.

  4. Rub the mixture through a sieve until smooth.

  5. Heat it thoroughly and serve with game or poultry.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  4. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

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

  5. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

French roll
Soaks up the milk and thickens the sauce as it breaks down into a soft crumb.
Milk
Cooks with the bread and flavoring to form the body of the sauce.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve until smooth. Straining breaks down the softened bread and any remaining solids so the sauce turns velvety rather than lumpy or grainy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, cream. 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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