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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from onion, peppercorns, milk, bread crumbs, butter, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. Place the sliced onion and peppercorns in a saucepan with the milk over boiling water.

  2. Cook until the onion is perfectly soft.

  3. Pour the mixture over the bread crumbs.

  4. Cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. Beat the mixture smooth.

  2. Add a pinch of salt.

  3. Add the butter rubbed in a little flour.

  4. Stir in enough sweet cream or milk to achieve the desired consistency.

  5. Boil for a few minutes until thin enough to pour.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk into a soft, spoonable sauce as they absorb liquid and swell.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs absorb and the onion flavours.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Lightly thickens the butter so it blends smoothly into the sauce.
Onion
Contributes savoury, aromatic flavour as it softens in the milk.

The step that matters

Boil until thin enough to pour. The sauce thickens as the crumbs absorb liquid and as it cools. Boiling for only a few minutes brings it to a pourable consistency, and adding cream or milk afterwards lets the cook adjust it. Overboiling can make it stiff.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, flour, 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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