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Bread Sauce

A sauce made by soaking stale bread in liquid, then boiling, beating, and seasoning with mace, pepper, salt, butter, and optional ingredients.

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

  1. Soak the stale bread in milk, cream, or white stock until tender.

  2. Boil the soaked bread until soft, then beat it on the fire.

  3. Add mace, pepper, salt, and butter, mixing well.

  4. Incorporate whole pepper, pulped onion, wine, currants, and sugar to suit the meat being served.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Mace + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaked and boiled until soft, it thickens the liquid into a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Milk, cream, or white stock
Softens the bread and forms the liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Beating the boiled bread on the fire. Bread that is not fully soft and beaten smooth will leave lumps, so the sauce will not thicken evenly. Cooking it until soft lets the starch in the bread swell and gelatinise into a uniform texture.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, butter, mace, pepper, wine, currant):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, mace, pepper, wine, currant. 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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