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Bread Sauce
2 cups milk. ½ cup fine stale bread crumbs 1 onion 6 cloves 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 3 tablespoons butter ½ cup coarse stale bread crumbs Cook milk thirty minutes in double boiler, with fine bread crumbs and onion stuck with cloves. Remove onion, add salt, cayenne, and two tablespoons butter. Usually served poured around roast partridge or grouse, and sprinkled with coarse crumbs browned in remaining butter.
A classic English bread sauce, printed here with one significant omission: the milk appears in the method but never in the ingredient list. Everything else is straightforward.
- The missing milkThe ingredient list gives no quantity. Contemporary versions of this sauce use about 2 cups (1 pint) of milk to 1½ cups of fine crumbs, which yields a thick, spoonable sauce. Judge by consistency rather than trusting any single figure, since crumb absorbency varies enormously.
- Stale bread crumbs"Stale" here means dry and a day or two old, not moldy. Commercial dried crumbs are too fine and too uniform; they turn the sauce pasty. Tear up day-old bread and pulse it briefly.
- Double boilerThe thirty minutes over simmering water is not fussiness. Milk and bread scorch readily over direct heat, and the long gentle infusion is what draws the clove and onion flavor through. A heavy saucepan on the lowest possible burner will work if you stir often.
- The clove-stuck onionPeel a small onion, cut a shallow cross in the root end so it holds together, and press the six cloves into it. Six is plenty for this volume; more turns the sauce medicinal. Pull the onion out whole before seasoning.
- Cayenne"Few grains" means the barest pinch. The heat should be undetectable as heat and register only as a lift against the milk and butter.
- The browned crumb toppingThe coarse crumbs fried in the remaining tablespoon of butter are the point of contrast, and they should go on at the table. Sprinkled early, they soften and the dish loses its texture.
- Game birdsPartridge and grouse are hard to come by outside a specialty butcher. The sauce is equally at home with roast pheasant, guinea fowl, or plain roast chicken, and it is the standard accompaniment to roast turkey in Britain.
- YieldSince the milk quantity is missing, the yield can only be estimated: roughly 2 cups of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings alongside a roast.
Bread sauce is an English survival of a much older European habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or egg, a technique that predates the roux and runs back through medieval cookery. By the nineteenth century it had narrowed largely to one job: the traditional partner to roast game birds and, later, the Christmas turkey, where its mildness sets off the strong flavor of the meat. Its appearance in an American cookbook of this period reflects the sustained English orientation of upper-middle-class dining, when a roast bird with bread sauce still read as the correct thing to serve. The clove-studded onion is the sauce's signature and recurs in most recorded versions from the eighteenth century onward.