Name: Bread Sauce
Ingredients: 6 ounces stale bread-crumbs; 1 pint milk; 1 eschalot

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

6 ounces stale bread-crumbs
1 pint milk
1 eschalot

Directions

In a clean saucepan, combine the bread-crumbs and milk.
Add the eschalot and bring to a boil.
Boil for 10 minutes, then the sauce is ready.

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.

Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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 milk and swell, thickening it into a soft, smooth sauce.
Milk: Provides the liquid that the crumbs absorb, giving the sauce its creamy body.
Eschalot: Adds a mild onion-like aroma and savoury flavour to the sauce.

“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.