Home › Sauces › Five Peppercorns
Five Peppercorns
One gill of Bread-crumbs. One small Onion. Half a pint of Milk.
Salt. One tablespoonful of Cream.
Put the milk into a stewpan, when boiling add the crumbs, onion, salt, and peppercorns, and let it stand by the fire for fifteen minutes to soak the bread, then stir it on the fire smoothly till it boils; add the cream, and stir till it just boils again. Before serving, take out the onion and peppercorns.
This is bread sauce, the standard English accompaniment to roast poultry and game. The page has been cut mid-ingredient-list — the heading "Five Peppercorns" is itself a line from that list — so quantities for the breadcrumbs, butter and onion have to be supplied from convention.
- The missing ingredientsA half-pint of milk (10 fl oz British measure, so about 1 1/4 cups) takes roughly 2 oz of fresh white breadcrumbs and half a small peeled onion left whole; many versions also stir in about 1/2 oz butter at the end, though here the enrichment is the tablespoon of cream. The five peppercorns and the onion are flavourings to be fished out, not eaten.
- Crumbs, not dried crumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, crust removed, are what is meant. Packaged dry breadcrumbs absorb differently and give a gritty, pasty sauce.
- The soaking step is the hingeFifteen minutes off the direct heat, with the pan merely warm, is what lets the crumbs swell and dissolve into the milk. Skip it and you get milk with wet bread in it, which no amount of later stirring will fix.
- "By the fire" and "on the fire"The first means residual warmth — a turned-off burner, or the lowest possible setting. The second means direct heat. Milk and bread scorch readily, so a heavy pan and constant stirring matter more than speed.
- Cream at the endA tablespoon of cream (single or double both work) is stirred in last and brought only just back to the boil, as the recipe directs.
- ConsistencyIt should fall thickly from a spoon rather than pour. If it stiffens on standing, as it will, loosen it with a spoonful of hot milk before serving.
- YieldThis quantity makes enough for about four alongside a roast bird. It is served hot, in a warmed sauceboat.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, often said to descend from the medieval bread-thickened sops and pottages that predate the roux entirely — before flour-and-butter thickening arrived from France, stale bread was the ordinary means of giving body to a liquid, though the sauce under that name is an eighteenth-century fixture. In the codified professional repertoire, bread sauce had narrowed to a single job: the fixed accompaniment to roast chicken, turkey, pheasant and partridge, sitting alongside the gravy rather than replacing it. The onion studded with cloves is the version most often seen today; here the aromatics are pared back to an onion and five peppercorns, both removed before serving, which tells you the sauce was expected to be pale, smooth and mild — a foil for game, not a competitor with it.