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Bread Sauce
2 tablespoons chopped onion 3 cloves bit of bay leaf sprig of parsley teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper 1½ cups milk bit of mace Scald milk with seasonings, cook twenty minutes, strain; add crumbs and butter, cook twenty minutes, and serve with game.
A classic English bread sauce, here written in the terse shorthand of a 1907 American cookbook. Two quantities are missing from the ingredient list entirely, so some judgment is required.
- The missing amountsThe method calls for crumbs and butter but the ingredient list gives neither. Standard practice for 1½ cups milk is about ¾ cup soft white breadcrumbs and 1 to 2 tablespoons butter; add the crumbs gradually until the sauce mounds softly on a spoon rather than pouring.
- Salt readingThe salt is printed with no number; a fraction has dropped out of the line. Something in the range of ¼ to ½ teaspoon suits this volume of milk. Season again after the crumbs go in, since bread absorbs salt.
- Crumbs, not dry crumbsThis wants soft crumbs from the interior of a day-old white loaf, torn or grated, not the sandy dry crumbs sold in canisters. Packaged dry crumbs give a pasty, gluey sauce.
- Mace and bay"Bit of mace" means a blade of mace, the lacy outer covering of nutmeg; a pinch of ground mace or a few scrapes of nutmeg substitutes. All the aromatics are strained out, so keep them in recognizable pieces.
- Two twenty-minute stagesThe first twenty minutes is an infusion off high heat; the recipe does not say to cover the pan, but keep the milk just below a simmer or it will reduce and catch. The second twenty is the crumbs swelling; use the lowest flame or a double boiler and stir often, as milk and bread scorch readily.
- Consistency at the finishThe sauce thickens noticeably as it stands and again as it cools. Hold it slack, and loosen with a spoonful of hot milk or a little cream just before serving.
- Yield and serviceMakes roughly 1½ cups, enough for four to six as an accompaniment. Serve hot with roast game birds, and traditionally alongside bread crumbs fried in butter for contrast in texture.
Bread sauce descends from the medieval practice of thickening with bread rather than flour or butter — the same logic behind pouring liquid over sops and behind older sauces such as the sharp bread-thickened condiments served with meat before roux became standard. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had narrowed to a single role: the plain, milky, mace-scented foil for roast fowl and game, and it is still the expected partner to English roast turkey and pheasant. Its appearance in an American cookbook reflects how thoroughly English cookery still framed the "proper" service of game in genteel American kitchens, where the sauces chapter dutifully reproduced the British canon whether or not the reader ever shot a grouse.