Bread Sauce
One pint of milk, three-fourths of a pound of dry bread crumbs, one onion, one ounce of butter, mace, salt and cayenne to taste. Cut up the onion and boil tender in the milk; strain the milk over the bread crumbs; cover and let stand long enough to soak up milk, then beat thoroughly; add salt, butter, pepper (cayenne) and mace. Boil up and serve. If too thick, thin with cream after the sauce is made. Serve with roast turkey, fowl, game, etc. Add oysters for oyster sauce.
A British classic that turns up in American books as the standard accompaniment to roast bird. The proportions here are the thing to watch.
- The crumb-to-milk ratioThree-quarters of a pound of dry crumbs to one pint (16 fl oz) of milk will give you a stiff paste, not a sauce. Start with 4-5 oz of crumbs, beat smooth, and add more only if it is thinner than you want; the recipe's own escape clause about thinning with cream suggests the author expected the same problem.
- Dry bread crumbsPeriod "dry crumbs" means stale white bread grated or rubbed through a sieve, not the sandy commercial crumb sold for breading. Crusts off, day-old loaf, torn and pulsed coarse gives the right soft texture.
- MaceBlade mace, the lacy covering of nutmeg, was sold whole, and in many period bread sauces it was steeped in the milk and strained out; this recipe instead adds it at the end with the salt, butter and cayenne, so ground mace is what it calls for -- about 1/8 teaspoon for this quantity. Nutmeg is the nearest substitute but is sharper, so use less.
- Steeping the onionThe recipe says to cut up the onion and boil it tender in the milk before straining. If you would rather infuse than boil, peel the onion and leave it whole or halved, stuck with a few cloves if you like, bring the milk barely to a simmer and draw it off the heat for 20-30 minutes. Milk boiled hard catches and gives the sauce a cooked-skin flavour.
- "Boil up and serve"Take this as a brief return to the heat to melt the butter and bring everything together, a minute or two over low heat with constant stirring. A crumb-thickened sauce catches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- Adding oystersShucked oysters need about two minutes in the hot sauce, just until the edges curl. The instruction to "boil up" does not apply once they are in; longer cooking makes them tough and leaches liquor that thins the sauce.
- YieldEnough for a roast bird with some to spare, though the exact quantity depends on how much of the crumb weight you actually use. It thickens further as it stands, so hold it warm over hot water and loosen with cream at the table.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving thickeners in English cooking, a direct descendant of the medieval practice of binding sauces with crumbs rather than flour or roux, and it outlived that fashion because it happened to suit roast poultry and game so well. By the nineteenth century it was fixed as the near-obligatory partner to roast turkey, chicken, pheasant and partridge on British tables, and American household books of the period carried it over largely unchanged. The onion-and-mace flavouring is traditional rather than optional: the same pairing shows up in the standard "onion sauce" and in the milk infusions used for bechamel, and it is what keeps the dish from tasting simply of wet bread. The closing note here, that oysters turn it into oyster sauce, reflects how cheap and ordinary oysters still were in American kitchens, where they were stretched into sauces, stuffings and stews as a matter of course.