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Bread Sauce for Partridges
Moisten soft crumb of bread in milk, and simmer it by the side of the fire with the lid on the pan for about fifteen minutes. Then add some butter, and season with pepper and salt.
A skeleton recipe even by Victorian standards: no quantities, no onion, no ratio of bread to milk. The technique is sound, but you will be supplying most of the detail yourself.
- No quantities are givenThe original leaves every amount to the cook. For a workable ratio, about 2 oz of fresh soft breadcrumbs to 1 cup (8 fl oz) of milk gives a sauce thick enough to hold on a spoon; the bread swells considerably as it sits, so add more milk at the end rather than starting thin.
- "Soft crumb of bread"This means the interior of a stale white loaf with the crust cut away, torn or rubbed into crumbs — not dried packaged breadcrumbs, which absorb differently and give a pasty result. Day-old bread is better than fresh, which turns gluey.
- "By the side of the fire"The instruction is for the cooler edge of a range, not direct heat: the sauce should barely tremble, never boil. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting, or a heat diffuser. Milk thickened with bread scorches on the bottom very quickly, so stir it once or twice even with the lid on.
- Fifteen minutes is rightUnusually for a Victorian timing, this one does not need shortening. The bread needs that long to swell and lose its raw taste; the sauce will look grainy at five minutes and smooth at fifteen.
- The onion this version omitsMany other bread sauces of the period begin by infusing the milk with a peeled onion stuck with cloves, sometimes with a blade of mace or a few peppercorns, strained out before the crumbs go in. This version gives no such step, whether by omission or compression; adding it back is what makes the sauce taste of something.
- Butter and seasoningAbout 1 oz of butter per cup of milk, stirred in off the heat so it emulsifies rather than splitting. Season generously — bread mutes salt, and an underseasoned bread sauce tastes of nothing at all.
- Yield and servingA cup of milk's worth serves four to six as an accompaniment. Serve hot in a separate boat; it stiffens as it cools and will need a splash of hot milk to loosen if it stands.
Bread sauce descends from the medieval tradition of thickening sauces with bread, which long preceded the roux-based French style; bread was one of the common thickeners in European cookery before flour and butter displaced it. It attached itself particularly to roast game birds and later to Christmas turkey, and by the nineteenth century it was firmly associated with partridge, pheasant and grouse. The stripped-down form here suggests a method being recorded rather than taught. The pairing persists on British game menus, usually alongside fried breadcrumbs and gravy, making bread twice over on the same plate.