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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a thickened gravy made from bread crumbs, milk or stock, onion, peppercorns, and finished with cream or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine bread crumbs and enough milk to soak them, plus a little extra, in a saucepan.

  2. Alternatively, make stock from giblets, head, neck, and legs of poultry, and moisten the bread with it.

  3. Add onion and peppercorns to the mixture and bring to a boil.

  4. Stir well, then reduce heat and let it simmer until thick.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove onion and peppercorns, then stir in cream, melted butter, or broth before serving.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Onion + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  5. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the liquid and swell, thickening the sauce into a smooth body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the crumbs and gives the sauce its creamy base.
Onion
Infuses the liquid with a mild, savory aroma during simmering.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Simmering until thick. Bread crumbs keep absorbing liquid and thickening as they simmer, so the sauce can become stiff or scorch on the bottom if the heat is too high. Gentle heat and stirring give an even, smooth texture.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, onion, 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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