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Sauce

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, onions, spices, and bread crumbs, used as a condiment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Peel and blanch the onion in scalding water for 5 minutes, then cut into quarters.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the milk, onion, peppercorns, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Heat the milk mixture over low heat, watching closely to prevent boiling over.

  4. Once hot, strain the milk into a clean saucepan.

Thicken and serve

  1. Stir in enough bread crumbs to achieve a puree-like consistency, off the heat.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the cream or beaten egg yolk mixed with warm milk.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale white bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and swell, thickening the sauce to a smooth, puree-like body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the onion and spice flavours and becomes the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the milk below boiling. Milk that boils over or scorches changes flavour and can form a skin, so gentle low heat keeps the infusion clean and smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, clove, mace, nutmeg, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, clove, mace, nutmeg, 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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