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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from stale bread crumbs, milk, butter, mace, cayenne, and milk or cream.

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

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Grate stale bread very fine.

  2. Boil the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  3. Cover with a plate and let it stand for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Put the soaked crumbs in a small saucepan and beat with a fork until smooth.

  2. Add mace and cayenne.

  3. Add butter and place on the fire, stirring constantly.

  4. Gradually add milk or cream while stirring.

  5. Boil for 4 to 5 minutes and serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Butter and mace 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

Stale bread crumbs
Thicken the milk into a soft, smooth body as they soak and swell.
Milk
Soaks into the crumbs and loosens the sauce to a pourable consistency.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add milk or cream while stirring. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the starch-rich crumbs evenly hydrated, so the sauce stays smooth instead of forming lumps.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, 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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