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Browned Bread Sauce
Use same rule as for Bread Sauce, adding one cup crumbs, which have been sautéd a light brown in butter.
A two-line variation that depends entirely on the bread sauce recipe printed above it: milk infused with onion and whole cloves, thickened with soft crumbs, finished with butter and seasoning. The addition here is a cup of separately fried crumbs stirred in at the end.
- Read the parent recipe firstThis entry gives no quantities of its own. Whatever the base bread sauce calls for — typically a pint of milk scalded with a small onion stuck with cloves, a cup or so of soft crumbs, a lump of butter, salt and pepper — stands unchanged, with the browned crumbs added on top of it.
- Two different crumbsThe crumbs in the base sauce dissolve into the milk and thicken it. The cup of sautéed crumbs is textural and must stay distinct. Use soft fresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, not dried or packaged crumbs, which turn to grit.
- Browning the crumbsButter over medium heat, crumbs stirred constantly until light gold. They go from pale to burnt in under a minute at the end, and the butter browns alongside them, which is much of the flavour.
- Add them lastStir the fried crumbs in off the heat, at the table if possible. Held in hot milk for more than a few minutes they soften and the point of the dish is lost.
- Infusing the milkScald the milk with the onion and cloves, then let it stand off the heat 15–20 minutes before straining. Boiling it hard extracts a harsh clove flavour and skins the milk.
- ConsistencyBread sauce thickens as it stands and again as it cools. Keep it looser than you want it; thin with a little extra hot milk before serving.
- Yield and servingThe entry states no yield; if the base sauce uses about a pint of milk it will serve roughly six to eight as an accompaniment. It belongs beside roast chicken, turkey, or game birds, served hot in a small boat.
Bread sauce is an English survival of the older habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or roux, and by the nineteenth century it was chiefly encountered as the standing accompaniment to roast poultry and game. The browned-crumb version answers a real complaint about the plain sauce, which is soft, pale and monotonous next to a crisp-skinned bird; fried crumbs, more often served loose in a separate dish than stirred in, were a usual partner to roast grouse, partridge and pheasant in English practice and in American books that followed it. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book — a volume published by a Boston chocolate manufacturer and best known for its confectionery — is a reminder that these promotional cookbooks aimed to be complete household manuals, carrying the full English-American repertoire of roasts and sauces alongside the caramels and fudge.