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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made by simmering onion and milk, then thickening with stale bread and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Infuse the milk

  1. Boil the onion, cut into quarters, with whole black pepper in milk until the onion is soft.

  2. Strain the milk over the grated stale bread and cover it.

  3. After an hour, transfer to a saucepan, add butter, and boil together.

Finish the sauce

  1. Season with salt and serve.

  2. Boil until thick and smooth, but not too thick to pour.

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
Bread crumbs absorb the flavoured milk and swell, thickening the sauce into a smooth body.
Milk
Liquid that carries the onion and pepper flavour and becomes the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Onion
Releases mild savoury flavour into the milk as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil until thick and smooth, but not too thick to pour. Bread starch thickens the milk as it cooks, and the sauce keeps thickening as it cools. Stop when it just coats a spoon, or it will set too stiff to pour.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, bread, butter, cream):

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

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