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Bread Sauce with Onion

A creamy sauce made from bread crumbs, onion, milk, butter, cream, salt, and nutmeg.

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 with Onion

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a clean saucepan, combine the bread-crumbs and onion with the milk.

  2. Boil gently, stirring often, until the onion is tender, about 40 to 60 minutes.

  3. Press the mixture through a fine sieve.

  4. If the sauce is too thin, reduce it by boiling quickly.

  5. Add salt, nutmeg, butter, and cream, stirring until the sauce reaches the desired thickness.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Fine bread-crumbs
Soak up the milk and thicken the sauce to a smooth, body-rich texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the crumbs absorb and gently cook into a sauce.
Onion
Releases mild sweetness and aroma into the milk as it simmers.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder, silkier mouthfeel and richer flavour.
Cream
Adds fat and smoothness, softening the sauce's finish.

The step that matters

Boiling gently while stirring. Milk scorches and sticks easily on the pan base, and the crumbs thicken unevenly if heat is too high or stirring is neglected. Gentle heat with frequent stirring keeps the sauce smooth and the onion infusing evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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