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Another Bread Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Another Bread Sauce

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 ↓

Another Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onion

  1. Cut the onion into four pieces.

  2. Parboil the onion in water until softened.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the onion in milk with black peppercorns until perfectly soft.

  2. Strain the milk over the grated brown bread and let it stand for 1 hour.

  3. Mix in the butter dusted with flour.

  4. Stir until it boils and serve in a sauce tureen.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Brown bread
Soaks up the flavoured milk and swells, giving the sauce its body and thickness.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Dusted onto the butter, it helps thicken the sauce as it comes to the boil.
Milk
Carries the onion and peppercorn flavour and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir until it boils. Flour thickens the sauce only when it reaches a boil and is stirred, so stopping early leaves it thin and floury-tasting, while constant stirring prevents lumps from forming on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

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

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

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