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Bread, Sauce

A sauce made by boiling onion and pepper in milk, then adding grated stale bread and cooking with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 bread milk

  1. Boil the onion with black pepper in the milk until reduced to a pulp.

  2. Strain the milk over the grated stale bread.

  3. Let the mixture stand for an hour.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a saucepan, mix the butter and flour.

  2. Add the bread mixture to the saucepan.

  3. Boil the mixture together.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

Stale bread
Soaks up the infused milk and swells, giving the sauce its body and thickness.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Combined with the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce as it boils.
Milk
Liquid base that carries the onion and pepper flavour and becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture together. Once the flour and butter are combined with the bread milk, the mixture must boil so the starch gelatinises and thickens the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin and raw-tasting.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, 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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