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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made by soaking bread in milk, onions, butter, and cream, seasoned with salt, pepper, and mace.

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

  1. Boil the onions in the milk until thoroughly flavored.

  2. Pour the milk over the crumbed bread.

  3. Let it stand for one hour or more.

  4. Place the mixture on the fire and reboil, adding the butter, cream, and seasoning.

  5. If the sauce is too thick, add more cream.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Crumbed bread soaks up the flavored milk and thickens the sauce into a soft, spoonable body.
Milk
Carries the flavor of the onions and forms the liquid base that the bread swells into.
Onions
Infuse the milk with their savory flavor during the initial boil.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Thick sweet cream
Adds richness and body, and loosens the sauce when it becomes too thick.

The step that matters

Reboiling after adding the bread milk. Reboiling the thickened mixture with butter and cream helps the starch from the bread gel and blend smoothly. Boiling too hard or too long can scorch the milk solids and make the sauce stick or turn grainy.

Swap the mace

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

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

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