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For the Bread Sauce
Peel and quarter one small onion and stew it in a pint of milk until perfectly tender; break and crumb three-quarters of a pound of stale bread into small pieces, carefully picking out any outside pieces; put it into a sauce-pan, strain the milk over it, cover, and let remain for an hour to soak, then beat it up very smoothly with a fork; add a seasoning of cayenne, and salt, with one ounce of butter; give the whole a boil and serve.
This is an English recipe.
A plain English bread sauce, thicker than most modern versions and worth adjusting to taste. Nothing here is difficult, but the bread-to-milk ratio needs watching.
- The ratio is the hingeThree-quarters of a pound of bread to a pint of milk gives a stiff, spoonable paste rather than a pouring sauce. If you want the looser sauce most people expect alongside roast poultry, hold back some of the crumbs or keep extra warm milk to slacken it at the end.
- Which pintThe recipe is labelled English, but the measure as printed cannot be pinned down: a pint in an American book of this kind would ordinarily be 16 fl oz, while an imperial pint is 20. Either way the mixture is stiff, and the larger volume gives the looser sauce.
- Stale bread, no crust"Carefully picking out any outside pieces" means discarding crust, which stays hard and speckles the sauce brown. Use a day-or-two-old plain white loaf; fresh bread turns gluey and pre-packaged dried crumbs give a sandy texture.
- Infuse the onion properlyStewing the onion in milk until tender takes 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer, uncovered enough that the milk does not boil over. A clove or two and a blade of mace pushed into the onion is the usual English addition, though this version leaves them out.
- The hour of soakingNot optional padding. The crumbs need that time off the heat to swell evenly; rushing it leaves lumps that no amount of beating will smooth. Keep the pan covered so a skin does not form.
- Butter and final heatOne ounce is two tablespoons. Add it at the end and give the sauce only a brief boil with constant stirring, as a thick bread mixture catches and scorches on the bottom very quickly.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a whisper, an eighth of a teaspoon at most. White pepper and a grating of nutmeg are the more common seasonings for this sauce and will not show as red flecks.
- YieldNo serving note is given. As written it makes roughly three cups, enough for a roast bird and a table of eight or more.
Bread sauce is among the older English sauces still in regular use, descending from the medieval practice of thickening with bread rather than flour or roux, and by the eighteenth century it was associated with roast game birds and later with the Christmas turkey. This version is explicitly labelled "This is an English recipe." The onion-and-milk infusion, the discarded crusts, and the long soak all point to a kitchen where stale bread was a resource to be used rather than thrown out, and where a sauce could be left standing an hour without anyone thinking it a hardship.