Skip to main content
Main

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from onion, milk, mace, cayenne, salt, breadcrumbs, and butter, served hot with roast poultry or game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Make the infused milk

  1. Simmer the onion in the milk.

  2. Season with mace, cayenne, and salt.

  3. Strain when the onion is tender.

Soak and finish

  1. Put the breadcrumbs in a clean pot and pour the strained milk over them.

  2. Cover and let soak for 1 hour.

  3. Add the butter and beat with a fork.

  4. Serve very hot with roast poultry or game.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Breadcrumbs
Absorb the flavoured milk and thicken it into a soft, spoonable sauce.
Milk
Carries the onion and spice flavours and forms the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish when beaten in.
Onion
Gives a mild savoury sweetness to the milk as it simmers.

The step that matters

Let the breadcrumbs soak fully. Breadcrumbs need time to absorb the hot milk and swell; rushing this leaves a thin, grainy sauce. Beating in the butter afterward helps smooth it.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, pepper, butter, walnut. 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