Is bread sauce on your festive menu?

Image credit: BBC Good Food

If you’re not from the UK, you may not have heard of bread sauce. You may be wondering what on earth it is and when you’d eat it.  

If you are in the UK, you may have strong opinions about it. In my empirical research (asking people I’ve seen recently) about bread sauce uptake, it’s a bit of a ‘marmite’ issue. People tended to react quite strongly: either with a ‘erm, no way would that make it onto my plate’ or a ‘oh definitely, it’s a Christmas staple’.

So what is it? Bread sauce is just what it sounds like. Bread(crumbs) made into a sauce. More specifically a thick sauce made of stale breadcrumbs and milk, infused with onion, bay leaves and cloves. It looks a bit like porridge (see photo).

It doesn’t sound that appetising for lunch, does it? It’s so curiously British.

You serve bread sauce the same way as you would gravy and cranberry sauce – it’s an accompaniment. In my opinion, it adds something valuable to the (quite bland) turkey.

I’m in the ‘oh definitely’ camp, and so is Nigella Lawson. So I’m in good company. It’s always there on our lunch table on 25 December, but I’m not sure anyone else at the table covets it like I do.

I keep coming back to it each year, finding its spices and consistency strangely comforting.

Let’s be clear: bread sauce offers almost no nutritional value. But it is cheap. It’s a great way to use up stale bread and other ingredients lying around. You can also make it up to three days in advance.

In case you wanted to know, bread sauce can be traced back to at least as early as the medieval ages, when cooks used bread as a thickening agent for sauces. According to the brilliantly named ‘The Past is a Foreign Pantry’ (subtitled ‘They dough things differently there’), ‘[Christmas] day is made or broken by the quality of the bread sauce.’ So there you go.

The Past is a Foreign Pantry also states that it should ‘taste creamy and mild, and ever so slightly fragrant’. Are you tempted to add to your festive menu yet?

In case you are tempted, here’s a recipe for a slightly more sophisticated version: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/bread-sauce-0

And please note: although bread sauce is not complicated to make, it cannot be rushed.