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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, breadcrumbs, onion, butter, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine milk, onion, and peppercorns in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. Stir in breadcrumbs and boil gently for about 15 minutes.

  3. Remove onion and peppercorns.

  4. Stir in butter.

  5. If the sauce is too thick, add more milk or a little cream.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Milk + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Breadcrumbs
Thicken the milk as their starch swells, giving the sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the breadcrumbs thicken into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with its savoury aroma during simmering, then is removed.

The step that matters

Boil gently after adding the breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs can settle and scorch on the base of the pan if the heat is too high. A gentle simmer lets them swell evenly and release their starch, so the sauce thickens smoothly without sticking or turning lumpy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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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