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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a thick, savory sauce made from stale bread crumbs, milk, butter, salt, mace, cayenne, and cream.

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

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Grate the stale bread very fine.

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

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

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

Make the sauce

  1. Add the salt, mace, cayenne, and butter.

  2. Place on the fire and stir constantly.

  3. Gradually add the milk or cream, stirring constantly.

  4. 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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Absorb the hot milk and swell into a thick, smooth body for the sauce.
Milk
Hydrates the crumbs and forms the liquid base that thickens into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Ground mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring while the sauce heats and after adding the milk or cream. Constant stirring keeps the starch from the bread crumbs dispersed evenly and prevents them from settling and scorching on the base of the pan, which would leave lumps or a burnt taste.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, pepper, 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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