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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, onion, bread crumbs, butter, and cream, seasoned with pepper and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bread Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. Stick the cloves into the onion.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the milk and the onion, and simmer gently for about 1 hour.

  3. Remove the onion from the saucepan.

Thicken and finish

  1. Add the bread crumbs, butter, salt, pepper, and cream to the milk.

  2. Stir until the bread crumbs have absorbed the milk.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that is slowly flavoured and then thickened into the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and swell, giving the sauce its thick, body-filled texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the flavour and making the sauce smoother.

The step that matters

Simmer the milk gently. Gentle heat lets the onion and cloves flavour the milk without scorching it or boiling it over. Scorched milk sticks to the pan and tastes bitter, and the milk can boil over.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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