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Sauce

Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling onion, black pepper, and milk, then mixing with grated stale bread, butter, and flour.

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

Make the bread milk

  1. Boil the onion with black pepper and milk until the onion is reduced to a pulp.

  2. Strain the milk and pour it over the grated bread.

  3. Let it stand for 1 hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and mix it with flour.

  2. Add the bread mixture and bring to a boil, stirring well.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

White bread
Soaks up the seasoned milk and thickens the sauce as it absorbs liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Cooked with butter to form a roux that helps thicken the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread swells in and the sauce is built on.
Onion
Simmered in the milk until pulped, adding savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil while stirring well. Stirring keeps the flour and bread from settling and scorching on the pan base. Bringing the mixture to a boil lets the starch gelatinise, which thickens the sauce evenly and removes any raw floury taste.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, milk, bread, butter, flour. 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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