Bread Sauce
1 cup bread crumbs 1 teaspoon butter 6 pepper corns 1/2 pint milk 1 small onion Salt, paprika Put the milk and an equal quantity of water in a saucepan with the onion, butter, salt and pepper corns, and cook for about fifteen minutes. Strain, add the bread crumbs and simmer for another fifteen minutes. If too thick add milk to make it the proper consistency. See that it is well seasoned.
A plain English bread sauce, here made without the usual stock or bacon fat so it suits a meatless table. The whole thing hangs on the crumbs: soft fresh ones, not dried.
- Half a pint1/2 pint is 1 cup of milk. With the equal quantity of water called for, you are simmering 2 cups of liquid down into 1 cup of crumbs.
- Bread crumbsUse soft crumbs torn or grated from a day-old white loaf with the crusts off. Dry packaged crumbs absorb far more liquid and turn the sauce pasty and gritty rather than fluffy.
- The onionPeel it and leave it whole or halved so it can be lifted out at the straining stage. Traditional versions stud it with two or three cloves, which the book omits.
- StrainingThe peppercorns and onion are aromatics only and must come out before the crumbs go in. Pour the infusion through a sieve and return it to the pan.
- Watch the heatOnce the crumbs are in, the sauce catches easily on the bottom of the pan. Keep it at a bare simmer over low heat and stir often; a heavy saucepan helps.
- Second fifteen minutesLonger than many modern recipes call for; ten minutes or so is often enough for the crumbs to swell and lose their raw bready taste, though the extra time does no harm if the sauce is still thin.
- SeasoningThe instruction to see that it is well seasoned is the real point. The recipe salts the infusion at the start, so taste and adjust at the end, finishing with the paprika and a further knob of butter if it seems lean.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 cups; the recipe gives no yield or serving count. It thickens as it stands and needs a splash of hot milk to loosen before serving.
Bread sauce belongs to a long European tradition of thickening with bread rather than flour, a habit older than the roux and still visible in dishes from Italian pappa al pomodoro to Spanish ajo blanco. In Britain it settled into one fixed role, served with roast fowl and game. Some versions were enriched with stock or drippings, so a sauce built on milk, water, butter and onion alone let a vegetarian household keep a familiar Sunday-dinner flavour while dropping the roast at the centre of it.