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Bread Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk, onion, peppercorns, bread crumbs, butter, flour, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Heat the milk with the sliced onion and peppercorns in a double boiler until the onion is soft.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the bread crumbs and cover for 1 hour.

  3. Beat the mixture until smooth.

  4. Add a pinch of salt and the butter rubbed in a little flour.

  5. Add enough sweet cream or milk to achieve the desired consistency.

  6. Boil for a few minutes.

  7. Ensure the sauce is thin enough to pour.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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

Bread crumbs
Thickens the milk into a soft, spoonable sauce as they absorb liquid and swell.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Helps the butter blend in and gives the sauce extra body and smoothness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that softens the crumbs and carries the onion and peppercorn flavour.

The step that matters

Boil for a few minutes. Bread crumbs keep thickening as they cool, so the sauce must be adjusted to a pourable consistency at the end. Thinning with cream or milk after boiling is easier than fixing a sauce that has become too stiff.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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