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Bread Sauce (Half pint grated bread crumbs)
Half pint grated bread crumbs, one pint sweet milk, and one onion; boil until the sauce is smooth, take out onion and stir in two spoons butter with salt and pepper; boil once and serve with roast duck or any kind of game. - Mrs. H. C. E.
An English bread sauce of the plainest kind, and it works if you treat the milk gently and let the onion do its job. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- The hinge: infuse, then thickenThe onion needs time in the milk to give up its flavour. Note that this recipe puts the crumbs, milk and onion in together and boils them until smooth, taking the onion out at the end; if you infuse the milk with the peeled onion first and add the crumbs after, you are departing from the original as written.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of crumbs is one cup, loosely packed; a pint of milk is two cups. "Two spoons butter" most likely means tablespoons, which would be about 1 oz.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs grated from a stale loaf, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs. Day-old white bread with the crust removed, grated or pulsed coarse, is the right texture; packaged crumbs will swell into glue.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh whole milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is correct here; skim gives a thin, chalky sauce.
- ScorchingMilk and starch on direct heat catch quickly. Keep the flame low, stir often, and use a heavy pan; a double boiler is the traditional insurance.
- SeasoningBread sauce takes more salt than seems reasonable and traditionally a good deal of white pepper. A blade of mace or a couple of cloves stuck into the onion is the standard English addition, though this version leaves it out.
- Consistency and holdingIt should fall thickly from the spoon, not stand up. It thickens as it sits, so loosen it with a splash of hot milk before serving.
- YieldRoughly two to three cups once the crumbs have swelled -- enough for several servings alongside roast duck, goose or game birds.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces still in regular use, a direct descendant of the medieval habit of thickening liquids with bread rather than flour or roux, and it is generally traced back through that tradition rather than to any single cook or date. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s it was long established in England as the customary partner to roast game and poultry, though it was never so entrenched in American practice, and it appears here with no explanation offered: every reader was assumed to know what it was for. The recipe's brevity and its initialled attribution are typical of the book, which is often said to have drawn on contributions from Southern housewives, each supplying a working method rather than a tested formula.