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Bread Sauce
Boil half pint milk in a small saucepan, add half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper, one half gill fresh bread crumbs and one teaspoon butter; mix all well together and let boil for six minutes, lightly mixing occasionally, and use as required.
A very compressed version of the English classic — no onion, no cloves, and a startling amount of cayenne. It works, but the proportions want checking before you commit.
- Half a gill of crumbsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is a scant 1/4 cup of fresh crumbs to a cup of milk. That gives a thin, pourable sauce rather than the thick spoonable kind most modern recipes aim for; double the crumbs if you want it to hold its shape on the plate.
- The saltspoon of cayenneA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in one cup of sauce is fierce by current tastes, and many other printed bread sauce recipes call for no more than a pinch. Start with an eighth and add at the end.
- Fresh crumbs, not dryThe recipe means soft crumbs torn or grated from the interior of a day-old loaf, with crust removed. Packaged dry breadcrumbs absorb far more liquid and give a pasty, gritty texture; the sauce will seize rather than thicken.
- Six minutes and no moreMilk with crumbs in it catches on the bottom of the pan quickly. Keep it at a bare simmer over low heat and stir more often than "occasionally" — the sauce should barely bubble, or it will scorch and taste of burnt milk.
- Butter lastAdding the teaspoon of butter off the heat at the end, rather than boiling it in, gives a glossier sauce and a cleaner dairy flavour. It is a small quantity; the sauce is meant to be lean.
- What is missingMost versions of bread sauce infuse the milk with half an onion stuck with two or three cloves, sometimes with a blade of mace or a bay leaf, strained out before the crumbs go in. Without it the sauce is little more than seasoned milk-soaked bread.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup — enough for three or four people alongside roast chicken, turkey, guinea fowl or game birds. Serve hot; it thickens noticeably as it stands, and a splash of hot milk loosens it again.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest surviving English sauces, descended from the medieval practice of thickening liquids with bread rather than flour or egg — a logic that can also be seen, by analogy, in sauces like the Catalan picada and the Italian salsa verde with its soaked crumb. By the eighteenth century it is generally said to have settled into its familiar role: the accompaniment to roast poultry and game, and above all to the Christmas bird, a role it still holds in Britain. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book is a reminder of how such collections worked — a national dish was reduced to five lines and set beside dozens of others, stripped of the onion and cloves that any English cook would have added without being told.