Bread Sauce
This sauce to be served with small birds.
Two cups of milk; one cup of stale bread crumbs; one-quarter of an onion; two tablespoons of butter; salt and pepper. The crumbs in bread sauce must be quite white. Sift the crumbs through a coarse sieve; place the fine ones that pass through in the milk, add the onion, and put the liquid in a stewpan on the fire to boil. Boil for twelve minutes; add one tablespoon of the butter, with salt and pepper to taste; and remove the onion. Place the remaining spoon of butter on the fire in a frying-pan, add the coarse bread crumbs, and fry them brown, being careful to have the butter very hot before putting in the crumbs. Stir vigorously for two or three minutes, taking care that the crumbs do not burn. Serve the sauce in a gravy dish and the browned crumbs on a very hot plate or small dish.
A classic English bread sauce, given here in the two-part form: a smooth milk sauce plus a separate dish of fried crumbs. Nothing in it is unsafe; the only real risks are scorched milk and gluey texture.
- The hinge: sift, don't dumpThe whole method depends on separating fine crumbs from coarse. Only the fine ones go into the milk, where they dissolve into a smooth puree; the coarse ones are fried and stay crisp. Bread pulsed to uniform crumbs will give you either a gritty sauce or limp crumbs.
- Stale bread means dry, not moldyUse a firm white loaf a day or two old, crusts removed, so the crumbs stay pale as the recipe insists. Fresh soft bread packs into paste; commercial dried breadcrumbs are too fine and too seasoned.
- Boil is really a simmerTwelve minutes of a true rolling boil will catch on the pan bottom and reduce the milk too far. Hold it at a bare simmer over low heat, stirring, and add a splash more milk at the end if it has tightened past the consistency of thick cream.
- The onionA quarter of a medium onion, left in one piece so it can be fished out. Studding it with two or three cloves and adding a blade of mace or a bay leaf is the standard English treatment and worth doing.
- Frying the crumbsOne tablespoon of butter for the coarse crumbs left in the sieve is scant; they will drink it immediately, so keep the heat moderate rather than "very hot" once they are in, and add a little more butter if the pan goes dry. Two to three minutes of constant stirring is right, and they go from gold to burnt in seconds.
- "Small birds"The book means roast game birds: quail, partridge, grouse, woodcock. Bread sauce is also the traditional accompaniment to roast chicken and turkey.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of milk with the fine crumbs makes roughly two cups of sauce. Both sauce and crumbs want to be genuinely hot; warm the serving dishes.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, a direct descendant of the medieval practice of thickening liquids with bread rather than with flour and fat, which is why it tastes older than the roux-based sauces that surround it in a book like this. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had settled into its fixed role as the accompaniment to roast game and poultry, milk infused with onion and clove and thickened with crumb, and it holds that place on British Christmas tables still. The separate dish of fried crumbs, sometimes called browned or buttered crumbs, was served alongside game as a matter of course in the same period; the Butterick book keeps both halves of the custom, insisting on the sifting step that lets one bread do two jobs. Its appearance in an American cookbook of 1911 is a reminder of how thoroughly the English game-dinner service was still being taught to middle-class households that were unlikely ever to see a woodcock.