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Sauce

Bread Sauce Another

A sauce made from soaked bread crumbs, milk, butter, spices, and onion, served with boiled fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bread Sauce Another

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk.

  2. In a saucepan, combine soaked bread crumbs, butter, salt, mace, cloves, whole pepper, and chopped onion.

  3. Cook over low heat, stirring slowly until the mixture is smooth and thick like 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up milk and thicken the sauce into a smooth, body-rich texture.
Milk
Hydrates the crumbs and provides the liquid that becomes the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel and a glossy finish.
Whole cloves
Infuse warm, aromatic spice flavour into the milk as the sauce cooks.

The step that matters

Cooking over low heat. Stirring slowly over low heat keeps the milk from scorching or curdling and lets the starch in the crumbs swell evenly, giving a smooth rather than lumpy sauce.

Swap the mace

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

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

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