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Bread-Sauce

A sauce made by soaking bread crumbs in cooking liquid, then simmering with onion, pepper, salt, mace, and finished with butter or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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. In a small saucepan, combine the grated bread crumbs and the cooking liquid.

  2. Let it soak, then add the sliced onion, white peppercorns, salt, and mace.

  3. Simmer for a few minutes, then remove the onion and peppercorns.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the melted butter or cream before serving.

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. Bread + muttontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated bread crumbs
Thicken the liquid as they soak up moisture and swell, giving the sauce its body.
Cooking liquid from mutton, veal, or poultry
Supplies the savoury meat flavour and the liquid that the crumbs absorb.
Sliced onion
Infuses a mild onion aroma into the sauce while it simmers, then is removed.
Melted butter or cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture at the end.

The step that matters

Simmering with the crumbs. Simmering too hard or too long can make the crumbs break down unevenly or the sauce turn gluey. A gentle simmer lets the crumbs swell and the flavours infuse smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, mutton, onion, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, mutton, onion, butter. 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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