Skip to main content
Main

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from soaked bread, milk, onion, peppercorns, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,399 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the French roll in half and break into small pieces or use bread crumbs.

  2. Peel the onion.

  3. In a clean saucepan, combine the milk, onion, French roll, peppercorns, and a little salt.

  4. Cover and let the mixture soak for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the saucepan over heat and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth and boiling.

  2. Remove the onion and peppercorns, then strain the sauce through a sieve.

  3. Return the sauce to the saucepan and stir in the cream.

  4. Stir again until the sauce boils; it is now 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.

  1. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

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

  3. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

French roll
Bread thickens the milk as it soaks and breaks down, giving the sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread softens into and thickens when heated.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savoury flavour during soaking.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring until smooth and boiling. Bread starch can clump or scorch on the pan base if the sauce is not stirred steadily as it heats. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed, so the sauce turns smooth and thickens evenly before straining.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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.

More bread sauce recipes

Eggs in 3 See all 282 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes