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Sauce

Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made by boiling onion in milk, straining, adding bread crumbs, cream, salt, cayenne, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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. Boil the onion in the milk for 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the milk over the bread crumbs.

  3. Add the cream, salt, cayenne, and pepper.

  4. Simmer slowly for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve at once.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk, giving the sauce its body as the starch absorbs liquid.
Milk
Forms the base liquid, carrying the onion flavour and becoming the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Onion
Infuses the milk with its mild savoury flavour during the initial boil.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 10 minutes. Gentle heat lets the bread crumbs swell and thicken the milk evenly. Boiling hard can scorch the milk on the base of the pan and cause the cream to separate.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, cream, pepper. 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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