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Bread Sauce
309. Boil a large onion (cut in four) with some black pepper and milk, till the onion is quite a pap. Pour the milk, after straining it, on grated white stale bread, and cover it. In an hour put it in a saucepan, with a good piece of butter mixed with a little flour; boil up together, and serve-a little cream added is a very great improvement.
A classic English bread sauce, given without quantities in the usual mid-Victorian manner. For a bird serving six, work from about 3 oz (a scant cup) of stale white breadcrumbs, 1 1/2 cups whole milk, one onion, 1 oz butter and a couple of tablespoons of cream.
- The hinge: stale bread, gratedThe bread must be genuinely dry white crumb, grated rather than blitzed to dust or torn into soft lumps. Fresh bread turns the sauce to paste, and modern soft sandwich loaves collapse entirely; use a firm white loaf left uncovered for a day.
- Cooking the onionQuartered onion in milk over low heat needs 20-30 minutes to reach the "pap" stage. Keep the milk barely trembling and stir the bottom occasionally, since milk scorches readily on a modern flat-bottomed pan over direct gas or electric heat.
- Whole peppercorns, not ground"Some black pepper" here most likely means whole corns, six or eight, since the milk is strained before it goes on the bread. Ground pepper stirred into the milk will speck the finished sauce grey. A blade of mace or a couple of cloves stuck in the onion is period-appropriate and common in other versions.
- The hour's soakThis rest is not idle time: it lets the crumb swell fully. Cover the bowl as instructed to stop a skin forming, and note that the sauce can sit here for several hours in the refrigerator before the final boil.
- Butter and flourThe butter kneaded with a little flour is worked in at the end to bind and gloss; note that the recipe calls for a good piece of butter to only a little flour, not the equal weights of a standard beurre manié. Whisk it in off the heat, then bring the pan back to a bare boil for a minute so the flour loses its raw taste.
- SaltNone is mentioned, but the sauce needs it. Season after the final boil, when the bread has taken up all the milk and the strength of the seasoning is finally apparent.
- Consistency and yieldIt should mound softly on a spoon, not pour. Thin with a little more hot milk if it has gone stiff during the soak. The quantities above are enough for a roast chicken or a brace of small game birds.
Bread sauce belongs to a long English tradition of bread-thickened sauces, descended from the medieval bread-thickened pottages and sops that were standard before roux-based sauces arrived from France; thickening with crumb rather than flour was ordinary practice in English kitchens for centuries. It became closely associated with roast poultry and game — chicken, turkey, pheasant, partridge — and it holds that role on British tables still, often alongside gravy at Christmas. The onion infusion, the stale crumb and the enrichment with butter and cream all appear in earlier eighteenth-century versions of the sauce.