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Bread Sauce
Take a little stale bread, and rub it through a wire sieve, or grate it, till two ounces of fine crumbs are obtained. Put these into a sauce-pan with half a pint of milk, a moderate-sized onion, peeled, and six peppercorns. Boil for ten minutes, and stir the sauce to keep it from burning. Lift it from the fire. Take out the onion and the peppercorns, stir in a small pat of butter, and two or three spoonfuls of cream, if it is to be had, and keep stirring till the butter is dissolved. Serve hot in a sauce tureen. Cooks often make the mistake of preparing this sauce some time before it is wanted, and this makes it pappy. If liked, a very little grated nutmeg can be added to the sauce, but most people would prefer that it should be omitted.
A short, plain sauce that lives or dies on timing. The book's own warning is the important instruction: made ahead, it swells and turns to paste.
- Make it lastThe crumbs keep absorbing milk off the heat, so a sauce held for twenty minutes thickens to a pudding. Finish it while the roast rests, or slacken it with a splash of hot milk just before it goes to the table.
- Half a pintIn an English book of this date that is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. Two ounces of fine dry crumbs is roughly ½ cup packed.
- The breadStale means dry and a day or two old, not mouldy, and crustless white bread with an open crumb. Much modern sliced sandwich bread contains added sugar and can give a slightly gummy sauce; a plain white tin loaf or baguette crumb is better.
- "Boil for ten minutes"Treat this as a bare simmer over low heat. Milk with bread in it catches on the pan base almost at once at a true boil, and the constant stirring the recipe demands is there for that reason.
- Onion and peppercornsLeave the onion whole so it lifts out cleanly, or halve it and stud it with a clove. Six loose peppercorns are a nuisance to retrieve from thick sauce; tie them in a scrap of muslin or use a tea infuser.
- Better infusionFor more flavour, warm the milk with the onion and peppercorns, take it off the heat and leave it covered for 20 minutes, then strain onto the crumbs and simmer. This is standard modern practice and costs nothing.
- Butter and creamA "small pat" is about ½ oz, roughly a tablespoon. Add the butter and cream off the heat as directed; boiling after they go in dulls the fresh dairy taste that is the whole point.
- YieldRoughly 1¼ to 1½ cups of sauce, enough for four. Salt is not mentioned but is needed; add it at the end, after the cream.
Bread sauce belongs to a long English tradition of bread-thickened sauces: crumbs were a common way to give body to a liquid well before the flour-and-butter roux became standard. By the late nineteenth century it had narrowed largely to a single job -- the accompaniment to roast chicken, turkey and game birds, especially pheasant and partridge -- and it holds that place on British tables still, largely at Christmas. The suggested nutmeg, dismissed here as something most people would rather do without, may be a remnant of older and more heavily spiced versions, which sometimes carried mace or cloves.