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Bread Sauce
Sufficient bread crumbs to fill a small tureen, ½ pint milk, 1 small onion, cayenne or white pepper and salt. Peel the onion and put it with mace into the milk, in which boil for a few minutes till the milk is flavoured. Then remove, put in the crumbs and seasoning and serve hot.
A terse version of the English classic, with the usual assumption that the cook already knows what bread sauce should look like. Two things are worth settling before you start: how much milk, and the mace that appears in the method but not the ingredient list.
- The half pintFive Roses was published in Canada, so the pint is imperial: ½ pint is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ cups. If you work from US measure you will get 1 cup, which makes a stiffer sauce. Either is usable, and you can loosen it with more hot milk at the end.
- Mace out of nowhereThe ingredient list omits it but the method calls for it. Use a blade of mace, or a pinch of ground mace, or a couple of cloves stuck into the onion, which is also a common English treatment.
- "Sufficient to fill a small tureen"Not a real measurement. For 1¼ cups milk, start with about 1 cup of soft fresh crumbs and add more until it mounds on a spoon without being pasty.
- Crumbs must be fresh, not drySoft crumbs from a day-old white loaf, crust removed, torn or grated rather than blitzed to powder. Packaged dry crumbs absorb too fast and give a gritty, gluey sauce.
- Infuse off the heat"Boil for a few minutes" risks the milk catching or boiling over. Bring it just to a simmer with the onion and mace, cover, and let it stand 15-20 minutes, then strain out the aromatics before the crumbs go in. Longer standing gives a stronger infusion.
- After the crumbsWarm gently for five minutes so the bread swells and the raw starch cooks off. A tablespoon of butter or a spoonful of cream stirred in at the end is traditional and improves the texture considerably.
- Yield and servingThis makes roughly 1½ cups, enough for four to six. It goes with roast chicken, turkey, or game birds, and should be served hot; it thickens as it sits, so hold back a little milk to thin it at the table.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, a descendant of the medieval habit of thickening liquids with bread rather than flour or butter, and it clung on into the twentieth century almost solely as the accompaniment to roast fowl and game. The method is often said to have changed little over the centuries: milk infused with onion and whole spice, then bound with crumbs. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book ": a promotional volume issued by a Canadian flour milling company and built largely from recipes contributed by housewives across the country "» shows how firmly British table conventions still governed Canadian cooking before the First World War. In that book it is filed under "Dumplings."