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Bread Sauce
1/2 cup stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup cold milk 1/2 teaspoon onion juice 6 whole peppers 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup cream Cook milk with fine bread crumbs, onion and whole peppers. Let simmer for five minutes, then pour in the cream, cook for five minutes longer, add seasonings, remove peppers, and serve with brown buttered bread crumbs sprinkled on top. to be served with roast partridge or grouse.
A very short sauce that lives or dies on the crumbs: stale, fine, and white. Fresh bread turns it to paste, and packaged dry crumbs make it gritty.
- "Whole peppers"These are whole black peppercorns, six of them, steeped in the milk for perfume rather than heat and fished out before serving. If yours are old and dusty, use eight; they lose aroma fast once cracked, so keep them whole as directed.
- Stale bread crumbsConventionally day-old white bread with the crust removed, grated or rubbed through a sieve; the recipe asks for fine crumbs, so keep them fine. Sourdough, whole grain and anything seeded will overwhelm the sauce.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavor without pieces: halve an onion and grate it on a fine rasp, then press the pulp through a sieve. Half a peeled shallot simmered in the milk and lifted out works as well.
- CreamCream of this period was not standardized and was often thinner than modern heavy whipping cream, nearer today's light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will make the sauce noticeably richer and thicker; thin it with a spoonful of milk if so.
- Heat controlKeep it at a bare simmer and stir often. Bread crumbs settle and scorch on the bottom of a thin pan, and a scorched bread sauce cannot be rescued. A heavy saucepan or a double boiler is worth the trouble.
- ConsistencyTen minutes total gives a loose, spoonable sauce. If it stiffens past that while it stands, loosen it with hot milk just before serving; if it is too thin, a few more crumbs and two minutes will set it.
- The buttered crumb toppingFry a couple of tablespoons of dry crumbs in butter over medium heat until they are an even hazelnut brown, then drain them. Add them only at the table, or they soften into the sauce and the contrast is lost.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for four small servings. Partridge and grouse are hard to come by; the same sauce is the standard accompaniment to roast chicken, guinea fowl or turkey.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, descended from the medieval habit of thickening liquids with bread rather than with roux or starch, and it stayed on the table long after flour-based sauces took over elsewhere. By the eighteenth century it was well established as an accompaniment to roast game birds, and later to Christmas turkey; it is still served that way in Britain. Its appearance in an American cookbook of this period is a reminder of how much of the standard household repertoire was inherited from English cookery: partridge and grouse were realistic table birds for anyone with a hunter in the family, and a milk-and-crumb sauce cost almost nothing to make from the heel of yesterday's loaf.