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Sauce

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made with onion, milk, pepper, stale bread, butter, flour, and egg.

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

  1. Boil the onion in milk with pepper until soft, then remove it.

  2. Pour the milk over the grated stale bread and bring to a boil with butter.

  3. Dredge with flour and beat well with a fork.

  4. Alternatively, slice the onion and cook it in veal gravy, then add grated bread, pepper, and a beaten egg.

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
Thickens the milk as it soaks and softens, giving the sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread absorbs and swells in.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Dredged over the mixture to help thicken and stabilise the sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with mild savoury flavour as it cooks soft.

The step that matters

Beating with a fork after adding flour. Flour dredged into hot liquid can clump; beating well disperses the starch so the sauce thickens smoothly rather than lumpily.

Swap the onion

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

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

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