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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, onion, spices, and stale bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, onion, peppercorns, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Heat on low, watching closely to prevent boiling over.

  3. Remove when frothy, let cool slightly, then return to heat until onion is tender, adding milk as needed.

  4. Strain the mixture through muslin into a bowl.

Thicken and serve

  1. Gradually add stale bread crumbs until desired consistency is reached.

  2. Reheat the sauce and finish with cream or egg yolk 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

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

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 spiced milk and swell to thicken the sauce into a soft, spoonable texture.
Milk
Carries the flavours of the onion and spices and forms the body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to finish the sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the milk on low. Milk scorches and boils over easily, and the onion and spices release flavour more gently at low heat. Watch closely so the milk does not boil over.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, clove, mace, nutmeg, bread, 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.

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