Bread sauce explained

A bread sauce is a British warm or cold sauce made with milk, which is thickened with bread crumbs,^[1] typically eaten with roast chicken or turkey.^{[2] [3] [4]}

Recipe

The basic recipe calls for milk and onion with breadcrumbs and butter added as thickeners, seasoned with nutmeg, clove, bay leaf, black pepper and salt, with the meat fat from roasting often added too.^{[5] [6]} The use of slightly stale bread is optimal.

History

A survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces, it typically accompanies domestic fowl such as turkey or chicken.Bread sauce can be traced back to at least as early as the medieval period, when cooks used bread as a thickening agent for sauces. The utilisation of bread in this way probably comes from cooks wanting to use up their stale bread who discovered that it could be incorporated within sauces to make them thicker.^{[7] [8] [9] [10] [11]}

See also

• List of bread dishes
• List of sauces

Notes and References

1. Web site: Definition of bread sauce in English. https://web.archive.org/web/20171228171759/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bread_sauce. dead. December 28, 2017. Oxford Dictionaries.
2. Web site: My Mother's Bread Sauce. Nigella. Lawson. Nigella.com.
3. Web site: Heston's Bread Sauce. Heston. Blumenthal. waitrose.com. 2017-12-28. 2021-12-04. https://web.archive.org/web/20211204124903/https://www.waitrose.com/home/recipes/recipe_directory/h/heston_s_bread_sauce.html. dead.
4. Web site: Bread Sauce. Jamie. Oliver. JamieOliver.com.
5. Web site: Traditional Bread Sauce. Delia. Smith. 9 November 2015. deliaonline.com.
6. Web site: How to make bread sauce. goodhousekeeping.co.uk. 27 June 2016.
7. Web site: In praise of bread sauce. 21 December 2017. Spectator. 28 December 2017. 28 December 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171228171731/https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/12/in-praise-of-bread-sauce/. dead.
8. Web site: The Kitchen Thinker: Bread sauce . The Telegraph . 16 February 2015.
9. Web site: Eat Ye Bread Sauce While Ye May: Brits Go Medieval On Christmas Day. NPR. 23 December 2016. npr.org. Richards. Alison.
10. Web site: Bread Sauce. www.foodsofengland.co.uk.
11. Book: Walker, Harlan. Milk: Beyond the Dairy : Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1999. 28 December 2017. Oxford Symposium. Google Books. 9781903018064.