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Bread

Bread Sauce

A sauce made by boiling bread crumbs and onion in milk, seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper, then topped with fried coarse crumbs.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the fine bread crumbs and onion in milk for 15 minutes.

  2. Add butter, salt, and pepper to the mixture.

Fry the topping

  1. Fry the coarse bread crumbs in 1 tablespoon of butter until brown.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over cold meat and sprinkle the fried coarse crumbs on top.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread crumbs swell and thicken into a sauce.
Fine bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and thicken the sauce to a smooth, spoonable body.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Chopped onion
Infuses the milk with savory, aromatic flavor as it simmers.
Coarse bread crumbs
Fried in butter until brown, they add a crisp, toasty texture on top.

The step that matters

Boiling the fine crumbs in milk. Crumbs must simmer long enough to fully soften and absorb the milk. Too little time leaves the sauce thin and grainy, while overheating can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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