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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from bread, milk, onion, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Soak the bread

  1. Cut the bread into slices or grate it into crumbs.

  2. Pour boiling water over the bread.

  3. Add coarse sea salt, milk, peppercorns, and cloves.

  4. Stir until it reaches a thick porridge consistency.

Infuse the milk

  1. Blanch the onion in scalding water for 5 minutes.

  2. Quarter the blanched onion.

  3. Combine the onion, peppercorns, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and salt in a saucepan with the milk.

  4. Heat the milk on low, watching closely to prevent boiling over.

  5. Strain the flavored milk over the bread mixture.

Finish the sauce

  1. Reheat the mixture.

  2. Stir in cream or a beaten egg yolk off the heat.

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. Clove + oniontop 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

Bread
Absorbs the liquid and swells, giving the sauce its thick, porridge-like body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavors of the infused aromatics.
Onion
Releases a mild savory aroma into the milk during infusion.
Cloves
Contribute a warm, pungent aroma to the infused milk.
Peppercorns
Add a gentle, sharp spiciness to the infused milk.
Cream or egg yolk
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the cream or egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk can curdle and turn grainy if it meets very hot liquid. Removing the pan from the heat before stirring in the yolk or cream lets it blend in smoothly and keeps the sauce velvety.

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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