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BREAD SAUCE (another way) (Stew the head neck and legs)
Stew the head, neck, and legs of poultry with an onion, a little mace, peppercorns, and salt. Take one pint of the broth when strained, pour it hot over twelve ounces of bread-crumbs, boil for ten minutes, and add three table-spoonfuls of cream. Time to make the broth, two hours.
A giblet-stock version of bread sauce, thicker and more savoury than the milk-based standard. The one number to watch is the bread: as written this sets to a stiff paste rather than a sauce.
- The bread-to-liquid ratioTwelve ounces of crumbs to one pint (an imperial pint, 20 fl oz) of broth is roughly four times what a modern bread sauce carries. Contemporary practice is about 2-3 oz of fresh crumbs per pint; if you want the Victorian body, start at 4-5 oz and add more only once it has swelled, keeping extra hot broth to hand for loosening.
- What kind of crumbsThis means the soft interior of a day-old white loaf, rubbed or pulsed to crumb. Dried, sandy packaged breadcrumbs absorb differently and will go gluey; panko will stay in visible flakes.
- Head, neck and legsPoulterers once sold birds whole with head and feet on, and those parts gave the stock its gelatine. A supermarket bird gives you the neck and giblets only, so make up the difference with a couple of wings or a chicken foot from a butcher.
- Whole spice, and take it outThe recipe asks only for 'a little mace' and peppercorns; a blade of mace and a dozen peppercorns is a reasonable reading. They go into the stockpot, not into the sauce. Strain the broth as directed; the onion has done its work and should not be pushed through.
- The ten minutes' boilingBread scorches on the base of a pan the moment it thickens. Use the lowest heat, a heavy pan and near-constant stirring, or set the pan over simmering water; the point of the ten minutes is to let the crumbs swell and lose their raw taste, not to reduce the sauce.
- Cream at the endThe three tablespoons of cream go in after the ten minutes' cooking; off the heat is safest, to soften the texture and dull the salt. Season again at this stage, as bread flattens salt considerably.
- Two hours for the broth'Stew' implies a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil, and it can be done a day ahead. Chill it and lift the fat, or the sauce will taste greasy.
- YieldRather more than a pint of finished sauce as written, given the bulk the crumbs add; enough for a roast bird and a table of eight or so.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English condiments, descended from the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or butter, and by the nineteenth century it was fixed as the standard accompaniment to roast chicken, turkey, partridge and pheasant. The familiar version is made with milk steeped with onion and clove; this variant belongs to the thriftier tradition of the giblet pot, in which the head, neck, feet and pinions removed in dressing a bird were simmered for gravy, giblet pie or a sauce like this one.