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Bread Sauce (Place a sliced onion and six)
Place a sliced onion and six pepper-corns in half a pint of milk over boiling water, until onion is perfectly soft; pour it on half a pint of bread crumbs without crust, and leave it covered for an hour; beat it smooth, add pinch of salt, and two table-spoons butter rubbed in a little flour; add enough sweet cream or milk to make it the proper consistency, and boil a few minutes. It must be thin enough to pour.- Mrs. J. L. T., Denver, Col.
An English bread sauce, thinned for pouring rather than the thick spoonable version common now. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the vessel need translating.
- Half a pintRead it as one cup — American pints were 16 fl oz then as now. So one cup milk to one cup soft crumbs, plus however much cream or milk it takes to thin it; enough sauce for a roast bird and several eaters.
- "Over boiling water"This means a double boiler or a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, not direct heat. Milk scalds and catches quickly, and the onion needs a long gentle infusion — allow half an hour or so, and judge it by the onion rather than the clock.
- Bread crumbs, not packaged crumbsThese are fresh crumbs from a day-old white loaf, crusts cut away, torn or grated coarse. Dry commercial breadcrumbs absorb differently and give a pasty result; the sauce depends on soft crumbs swelling in warm milk.
- Strain out the peppercornsThe recipe never says to remove them, but six whole peppercorns in a pouring sauce are unwelcome. Strain the infused milk onto the crumbs, or tie the aromatics in a scrap of cheesecloth. The soft onion may be left in and beaten smooth, or lifted out for a paler sauce.
- "Butter rubbed in a little flour"The same principle as beurre manié: the recipe's two tablespoons of butter worked with a little flour and stirred in to bind and gloss. Keep the flour to the small quantity specified — more than that turns bread sauce into paste.
- The final boilA few minutes at a bare simmer is enough to cook out the flour. Keep stirring and keep the heat low, since a thin milk-and-crumb sauce scorches on the bottom of the pan without warning.
- ConsistencyAim for something that coats a spoon but runs off it freely, like heavy cream. It thickens noticeably as it stands, so hold back a little of the cream and adjust just before serving.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, a descendant of the medieval habit of thickening liquids with bread rather than flour, and it has been served with roast poultry and game birds since long before roux-based sauces reached domestic kitchens. Its presence in an American community cookbook of the period, contributed by a woman in Denver, shows how thoroughly the late nineteenth-century American community cookbook drew on inherited British cookery: English standards were passed hand to hand and gathered up alongside local dishes. The thin, pourable version specified here differs from the thick, stiff bread sauce familiar from British holiday tables, though bread sauce recipes vary widely across periods and it is hard to say which is the older practice u2014 and the onion-and-peppercorn infusion, then strained, is the technique that keeps a sauce made of milk and bread from tasting of nothing at all.