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Bread Sauce

Bread sauce is a veal gravy thickened with bread crumbs and cream, optionally flavored with mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,536 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour very pale, strong veal gravy over the bread crumbs instead of milk.

  2. Soak the bread crumbs in the gravy.

  3. Boil the soaked crumbs until extremely dry.

  4. Add rich cream to achieve the proper consistency.

  5. Optionally, flavor the gravy with mushrooms.

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 + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Cream + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Bread + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  5. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the gravy and thicken the sauce into a soft, spoonable body.
Veal gravy
Supplies the liquid and savory flavor that the bread crumbs soak up.
Rich cream
Adds fat and richness, smoothing the texture and softening the flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the soaked crumbs until extremely dry. Boiling drives off excess liquid so the crumbs swell and thicken into a sauce. If the mixture stays wet, the sauce will be thin, and cream added afterward cannot fix the texture properly.

“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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