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Bread Sauce (Place a sliced onion and six)
Place a sliced onion and six pepper-corns in half a pint of milk over boiling water, until onion is perfectly soft; pour it on half a pint of bread crumbs without crust, and leave it covered for an hour; beat it smooth, add pinch of salt, and two table-spoons butter rubbed in a little flour; add enough sweet cream or milk to make it the proper consistency, and boil a few minutes. It must be thin enough to pour. - Mrs. J. L. T., Denver, Col.
A classic English bread sauce, written in the compact style of the period. The proportions are sound; only the vessels and a few habits need translating.
- Half a pintA half pint is one cup. So: 1 cup milk infused with the onion, poured over 1 cup of soft breadcrumbs (crusts removed), which is only about 1 1/2 to 2 oz by weight since the crumbs are loose.
- "Over boiling water"This means a double boiler, not direct heat. Milk scorches easily and the gentle heat lets the onion soften without the milk catching. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir and watch it.
- The onion is the pointSimmer until it is genuinely collapsing, which may take 20 to 30 minutes for a small onion over water; underdone onion leaves the sauce sharp and raw-tasting. Many modern versions strain or fish the slices out before serving, though this recipe does not say to.
- PeppercornsSix whole white or black peppercorns are for infusion only. Strain or pick them out unless you want someone to bite one.
- The hour of standingNot optional padding. That is when the crumbs swell and the sauce loses its bready graininess. Skipping it gives you thin milk with wet bread in it.
- Butter rubbed in flour2 tablespoons soft butter worked with a little flour (a teaspoon or so is enough; the recipe does not specify). It thickens as it melts in. Bread sauce is thickened by bread, so keep the flour light.
- "Boil a few minutes"Bring it just to a bare simmer, stirring, for two or three minutes to cook out the flour. A hard boil on a milk-and-bread sauce sticks and scorches.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, depending on how much cream or milk is added at the end. Serve hot, poured, alongside roast poultry or game; it thickens as it cools, so loosen with warm milk at the last moment.
Bread sauce is often said to be one of the oldest surviving English sauces, a descendant of the medieval practice of thickening liquids with bread rather than flour or roux, and it clung to the roast-fowl course long after flour-based sauces took over everything else. Its appearance in a Minnesota-published American compendium like Buckeye Cookery (1877) suggests how far English roast dinner conventions may still have shaped what a respectable Midwestern table served with turkey, chicken or game birds. That this version arrives from a contributor in Denver is a reminder of how the book was assembled: readers and acquaintances mailed in their household versions, and the same dish can appear more than once in slightly different dress. The onion-and-peppercorn infusion, the crustless crumb, and the insistence that it be thin enough to pour are all still the marks of a properly made bread sauce.