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Bread Sauce

A savory sauce made from stale bread crumbs, milk, onion, garlic, salt, cayenne, and butter, served with roast or steamed poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 and cook

  1. Tie the onion and garlic cloves loosely in cheesecloth.

  2. In a double boiler, cook the bread crumbs, milk, and onion for 30 minutes; then remove the onion.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the salt, cayenne, and butter to the mixture.

  2. Serve with roast or steamed chicken and roast partridge.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Starch that absorbs the milk and swells, thickening the sauce to a spoonable body.
Milk
Liquid base that gives the sauce its creamy, smooth texture.
Butter
Fat that adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savory aroma during cooking and is removed before serving.
Cloves
Infused into the milk to add a warm, aromatic spice flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the bread crumbs and milk in the double boiler. Gentle indirect heat keeps the milk from scorching or boiling over while the bread crumbs soften and thicken the sauce. Removing the onion afterward stops its flavour from becoming too strong.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

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