No. 438

Bread Sauces, American, English, French, Reglain and German Fried

(Suces au Pain, Americaine, Anglaise, Francaise, Reglain et Frite a l'Allemande).

American.—Put into a saucepan one ounce of butter with one ounce of finely chopped onions, fry them lightly without coloring and moisten with a pint of boiling milk, add two ounces of bread-crumbs, salt, cayenne pepper and cloves, and just when ready to serve, add a little cream to finish. This sauce should be consistent and hot without boiling.

English is made exactly the same, only replacing the fried onions by a raw onion cut in four, and whole peppers instead of the cayenne.

French.—Chop up a shallot and a quarter of a clove of garlic, putting them in a saucepan with two gills of white wine; let simmer and reduce, adding two tablespoonfuls of very fine bread-crumbs, a little fresh butter, a dash of mignonette and grated nutmeg and two gills of broth, let reduce to half, then squeeze in some lemon juice and a teaspoonful of chopped parsley.

A la Reglain.—Set four gills of milk into a saucepan, adding two ounces of bread-crumbs and one shallot cut in small eighth inch squares, a whole clove of garlic, and let heat without boiling for a few minutes, seasoning with salt, a little cayenne and nutmeg, two ounces of butter, a teaspoonful of raw fine herbs, one gill of white wine and the juice of an orange.

Fried German.—Melt and heat gradually half a pound of butter so as to obtain a hazel-nut butter, incorporate into it three ounces of white bread-crumbs, cook it over a slow fire for a few minute without ceasing to stir, salt it lightly and take off the fire to pour into a hot sauce boat.

← No. 437 Bourguignotte Sauce-Lean Hot Sauces No. 439 Bretonne Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Five bread sauces in one entry, all built on the same principle: starch from bread thickens a liquid without flour or roux. Ranhofer assumes you can read a French kitchen shorthand that has largely disappeared.

GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Two gills is one cup; four gills is one pint. The Reglain version therefore starts with a pint of milk and finishes with a half cup of white wine.
Do not let it boilBoth the American and Reglain sauces say to heat without boiling, and that is the hinge. Boiling milk thickened with bread makes it grainy and pasty, and it will catch on the pan bottom well before it looks scorched. Keep it at a bare steam, stirring.
Bread-crumbs mean stale crumb, not packagedNineteenth-century bread-crumbs are the soft interior of day-old white bread rubbed through a sieve. Dry commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and stay gritty; grate or tear crustless white bread and let it sit out an hour. Two ounces is roughly a cup of soft crumbs, though it varies with how tightly packed.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked white or black peppercorns, not the shallot-and-vinegar oyster dressing that carries the name today.
Fine herbsFines herbes: a mix of chopped parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives. "Raw" here appears to mean uncooked and fresh rather than previously sweated in butter; the recipe adds them to the warm milk, not off the heat.
Hazel-nut butterBeurre noisette, butter cooked until the milk solids brown and it smells of nuts. The German fried sauce is essentially browned butter carrying toasted crumbs, and it goes from nutty to burnt in under a minute once it colors.
Half a pound of butterThe fried German version is very rich by modern standards: half a pound of butter to three ounces of crumbs. The recipe directs it into a hot sauce boat, so it is served in small quantity as a dressing rather than as a pouring sauce.
Yield and serviceThe American version starts from a pint of milk and yields roughly that; the Reglain version yields rather more, since a gill of wine, orange juice and butter go in on top of four gills of milk. Bread sauce sets firm as it cools, so hold it in a warm bain-marie and loosen with a spoonful of hot milk before it goes to table.

A Little History

Bread sauce belongs to an old family of thickeners: before roux became standard, cooks bound liquids with soaked crumb, almonds or egg. Its survival as the traditional English accompaniment to roast fowl is usually traced to medieval practice, where bread was both the thickener and, as a trencher, the plate. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and a Frenchman by training, is doing something characteristic of The Epicurean (1894) here: gathering the national variants of a single preparation into one numbered entry so a brigade cook could produce whichever the menu called for. The "American" version takes fried onion and cayenne, where the English leaves a quartered raw onion to infuse and pulls it out; the French and Reglain versions abandon the milk-and-onion idea almost entirely for wine, garlic and acid, which tells you how loosely the category was drawn. Reglain does not appear to correspond to any well-documented place or person, and is likely a house name of the sort Ranhofer scattered through the book.