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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, stale bread, onion, 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

Infuse the milk

  1. Boil the quartered onion with black pepper and milk until the onion is soft and mushy.

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

Thicken and serve

  1. After an hour, transfer the mixture to a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter mixed with flour and boil everything together, then serve hot.

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 white bread
Soaks up the milk and swells, thickening the sauce and giving it body.
Milk
Liquid base that carries the onion and pepper flavour and becomes the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich taste and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Combines with butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce further.
Onion
Softens while simmering in the milk, adding mild sweetness and aroma.

The step that matters

Boiling the butter and flour into the sauce. The flour must be fully cooked in the hot mixture to thicken smoothly and lose its raw, pasty taste. Stirring it in well prevents lumps.

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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