Home › Breakfast Dishes › Eggs with Bread Sauce
Eggs with Bread Sauce
A cupful of dry bread crumbs, using only the interior of the loaf. Put into a saucepan with a cupful and one-half of milk, one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne and a half teaspoonful of onion juice (if liked), and simmer slowly until thick and smooth, beating several times with a spoon. Pour the sauce into a broad, shallow dish and break carefully over it half a dozen eggs. Place in a hot oven until the eggs are set; then send quickly to the table..
A breakfast dish of eggs baked on a bed of English-style bread sauce. It stands or falls on the sauce: too thin and the eggs sink, too thick and it turns to paste.
- "Dry bread crumbs" here means soft crumbs"Dry bread crumbs" -- The instruction to use only the interior of the loaf specifies crumb rather than crust. In period usage the term could cover crumb from a stale or dried loaf as well as soft fresh crumb; the modern hard, canister-fine crumb absorbs far more liquid and would give a stiff paste at this ratio, so soft crumb rubbed from a day-old loaf is the safer reading.
- Ratio and consistencyOne cup crumbs to a cup and a half of milk gives a sauce roughly the thickness of soft mashed potato. Simmer over low heat, beating as directed, and expect five to eight minutes. If it tightens too much before the eggs go on, loosen with a spoonful or two of milk.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "hot" in cookbooks of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400F or above. Watch the dish rather than the clock: pull it when the whites are just opaque, as carryover heat in the hot sauce continues to cook them.
- The dish"Broad, shallow" is the operative phrase. A 9- or 10-inch gratin dish or pie plate holds six eggs in a single layer without crowding. A deep casserole steams the eggs and gives a rubbery result.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a small onion yields well more than the half teaspoon called for. Grated onion left in the sauce works too but changes the texture.
- Cayenne and seasoningA dash means a pinch, roughly an eighth of a teaspoon. Taste the sauce for salt before the eggs go on, since you cannot correct it afterward without disturbing them.
- YieldSix eggs serves three at a substantial breakfast, or four alongside bacon and toast. It does not hold; the sauce skins and the yolks firm within minutes, which is why the original says to send it quickly to the table.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest survivals in English cookery, a medieval thickening habit that outlived the general use of bread as a liaison and settled into a single fixed role beside roast poultry and game. By the late nineteenth century it was a fixture of the British middle-class table, usually simmered with an onion stuck with cloves and finished with cream. Recipes like this one show a thrifty second life for it: the same crumb-and-milk base, seasoned rather more sharply with cayenne and onion juice, repurposed as a bed for baked eggs at breakfast. Such conversions turn a sauce or a leftover into the foundation of a hot dish that could be assembled quickly and carried to the table in the pan it baked in. The oven-set egg, or oeuf sur le plat in its French form, was standard breakfast fare in the same years.