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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a creamy sauce made from bread, water, onion, mace, peppercorns, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

  1. Crumb the bread slices into a saucepan.

  2. Add water, onion, mace, and peppercorns.

  3. Boil together, then remove the onion and spices.

  4. Mash the bread until smooth.

  5. Stir in butter and salt.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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
Its starch thickens the liquid into a smooth, soft sauce body as it soaks and mashes.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Infuses the water with savoury flavour during simmering, then is removed.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, onion, 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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