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Bread Sauce

A sauce made from milk, stale bread, onion, butter, flour, and pepper.

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 infusion

  1. Cut the onion into quarters.

  2. Boil the onion with black pepper and milk until the onion is soft.

  3. Strain the milk over the grated bread.

  4. Cover the mixture.

Thicken and serve

  1. After an hour, transfer the mixture to a saucepan.

  2. Add butter mixed with flour and boil together.

  3. Serve hot.

  4. Add cream if desired.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale white bread
Soaks up the seasoned milk and swells, giving the sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread absorbs and cooks into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the texture.
Flour
Mixed with butter to thicken the sauce as it boils.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savoury flavour during the initial boil.

The step that matters

Boiling the butter and flour together. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid long enough for starch granules to swell. Boiling the mixture together ensures it thickens fully and loses any raw floury taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, milk, bread, butter, flour, 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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