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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from onion, peppercorns, milk, bread crumbs, butter, and sweet cream, served with duck or game.

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

Make the infusion

  1. Place sliced onion and peppercorns in a saucepan with milk over boiling water until onion is soft.

  2. Pour mixture over bread crumbs and cover for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat mixture smooth, then add pinch of salt and butter rubbed in a little flour.

  2. Add sweet cream or milk to achieve pourable consistency and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Serve with duck or any kind of game.

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
Absorb the flavoured milk and swell, thickening the sauce into a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Binds with the butter so the sauce thickens evenly without lumps.
Milk
Carries the onion and peppercorn flavours and forms the base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour rubbed into butter must be fully mixed in before boiling, or it can form lumps and leave the sauce uneven in texture. Boiling briefly after adding flour also cooks out its raw taste and lets the starch thicken fully.

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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