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Bread Sauce for Roast Turkey

A creamy sauce made from milk, bread crumbs, onion, mace, cayenne, salt, and butter, served hot over roast turkey.

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 for Roast Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onion.

  2. Simmer the onion in the milk until tender.

Soak and beat

  1. Break the bread into pieces and place in a saucepan.

  2. Strain the milk over the bread and cover tightly; let soak for 1 hour.

  3. Beat the mixture until smooth, then add mace, cayenne, salt, and butter.

Finish and serve

  1. Bring to a boil and serve hot, removing the onion before pouring the sauce over the bread.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and thicken the sauce to a smooth, spoonable body.
Milk
Carries the onion flavour and becomes the liquid base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Onion
Infuses the milk with savoury, aromatic flavour before being removed.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil after beating. Milk scorches and can curdle if it is heated too hard or left unattended, so heat gently and stir until the sauce is hot and thickened.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, 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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