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Bread Sauce (Half pint grated bread crumbs)
Half pint grated bread crumbs, one pint sweet milk, and one onion; boil until the sauce is smooth, take out onion and stir in two spoons butter with salt and pepper; boil once and serve with roast duck or any kind of game. - Mrs. H. C. E.
A classic English bread sauce, given in the compressed style of the period. The proportions work as written; the only real risks are scorching the milk and using the wrong sort of crumbs.
- Quantities in cupsHalf pint of grated crumbs is one cup, loosely packed; one pint of milk is two cups. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for in period baking.
- "Two spoons butter"Read this as two tablespoons, roughly an ounce. Period recipes often write "spoon" without specifying, and for enriching a sauce of this size a tablespoon measure is the likeliest reading.
- The crumbs matter mostGrated crumbs means dry, stale bread rubbed on a grater, not soft fresh crumb and not packaged breadcrumbs, which are too fine and turn the sauce to paste. Cut the crusts off a day-old white loaf and grate it coarsely.
- Heat controlMilk and starch scorch readily. Use a heavy pan over low heat, or warm the milk with the onion first and add the crumbs off the boil, then let it barely simmer 15-20 minutes, stirring.
- The onionPeel it and leave it whole so it can be lifted out cleanly. Traditional practice is to stud it with three or four cloves and add a blade of mace or a bay leaf; the recipe omits these, and the sauce is noticeably flatter without at least the cloves.
- Consistency"Boil until the sauce is smooth" means until the crumbs have dissolved into a thick pouring sauce, about the body of loose porridge. If it stiffens on standing, thin with a little more hot milk before serving.
- YieldAbout two cups, to be served hot alongside a roast duck or game birds. Best made close to the meal.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, a descendant of the medieval practice of thickening with bread rather than roux flour, and it stayed on the table long after butter-and-flour thickening took over elsewhere. Its fixed partner is roast poultry and game, and its appearance here, contributed under initials of the kind that fill Buckeye Cookery (first published 1877 at Marysville, Ohio), suggests how English habits persisted in Midwestern kitchens: a household that shot ducks or bought prairie chickens still expected the same accompaniment an English cook would have set beside a pheasant. The frugality is also plain. A cup of stale bread, milk, an onion and a spoonful of butter make a substantial sauce out of what would otherwise be waste.