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Bread Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Prepare

  1. Remove the crust from the bread crumbs to ensure the sauce is very white.

  2. Combine the bread crumbs, milk, peppercorns, and onion in a saucepan.

  3. Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the onion and peppercorns from the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the butter until melted.

  2. Add a pinch of nutmeg if desired.

  3. Serve hot in a sauce tureen.

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. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Bread crumbs
Thicken the milk as they soak and swell, giving the sauce its body.
Rich milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs absorb and thicken into a sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel as it melts into the sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savory aroma during simmering and is removed afterward.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after the boil. Bringing the milk to a boil and then simmering helps the bread crumbs soften and thicken evenly. Boiling hard can scorch the milk on the pan bottom and make the sauce lumpy or stuck.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, onion, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe 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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