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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a creamy sauce made from milk, stale bread crumbs, onion, butter, salt, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, cook the milk, stale bread crumbs, and onion for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the onion and season the sauce with salt and cayenne.

  3. Add the butter and stir until melted.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around grouse.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread slowly thickens into a smooth sauce.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and swell as they cook, thickening the sauce to a soft, spoonable body.
Onion
Infuses the milk with mild aromatic flavor while it cooks, then is removed.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky finish when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Cooking the milk, bread and onion in a double boiler. Gentle, indirect heat keeps the milk from scorching or boiling over while the bread softens and thickens. Too much heat can make the sauce catch on the pan or turn lumpy, so the bread should be fully softened and the mixture kept steady over the full 30 minutes.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, 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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