Skip to main content
Main

Bread Sauce

A sauce made from bread crumbs, onion, butter, pepper, milk, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Rub stale bread through a wire sieve to make fine bread-crumbs.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine bread-crumbs, onion, butter, and black peppercorns with milk.

  2. Simmer for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the onion and season with salt and white pepper.

  4. Stir in cream just before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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 into a soft, smooth sauce as they swell and absorb liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread-crumbs swell into and thicken.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, lighter body when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Simmer for 15 minutes. Simmering lets the crumbs swell and release their starch, thickening the milk gradually. Too little time leaves a thin, grainy sauce, while boiling hard can scorch the milk on the pan base.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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

More bread sauce recipes

Eggs in 3 See all 282 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes