Bread sauce

Partridge for dinner last night. Roasted for 20 minutes at 220C. Could have done with a minute or two more, I think. Slightly disappointing, we both thought, just a little too like chicken to be worth bothering with. But it was red legged partridge, which is not so tasty as the native grey partridge.

I'm posting my method for making bread sauce because Lettice rang up from university last week to ask how to make it, after failing to find it on the blog. The really important thing is to have decent bread. Proper bread, preferably a loaf you made yourself. Anything that comes in a plastic bag will almost certainly not make decent breadcrumbs.

You hear people say they can't be bothered with bread sauce because it doesn't taste of much; I think they've probably only ever had packet bread sauce. For years I didn't bother, which I now rather regret, as it adds good texture to any bird. It's a good way to use up stale bread (important if you make your own, when there's no question of throwing any away), AND it's one of those thrifty dishes that stretches the meat further .... another way to eat less meat &/or save a little money. All the virtues. Especially if you bake a loaf first.

Bread sauce

I do it all by eye. It's very forgiving: if you get it wrong, you can correct it with more milk or breadcrumbs. It's also easy, so long as it's the first thing you prepare; it doesn't require much input from the cook, but it does need time to develop into something worth eating.

You'll need

milk (it doesn't have to be full-fat; I often use skimmed if that's what there is)
onion
cloves
nutmeg
good breadcrumbs

Peel an onion or two (I used a couple of shallots yesterday). I generally cut them into chunks and leave them in the finished sauce, but this is not what refined cooks do. Pour milk into a saucepan (say, 5-600ml). Add the onions, a couple of cloves (stick them into the onion if you're going to fish it all out at the end), and grate a little nutmeg into the pan. A bay leaf would be good, too.

Heat the milk, but do not let it boil. Leave to steep for at least half an hour. Then add breadcrumbs (best if they're not blitzed to dust; a few bigger bits add texture). Somewhere between three and five slices is probably about right for up to 600ml of milk; they'll swell up as they absorb the flavoured milk, so leave a little spare milk in the mix. Better to be adding more crumbs at the end than milk, as any liquid you add will dilute the taste.

When you're ready to eat, reheat the sauce, adding more milk or breadcrumbs if necessary. Taste it, too, although you're unlikely to need to salt it, as bread is high in sodium.

Related posts

Roast grouse with bread sauce

Other things to do with stale or leftover bread

Panzanilla
Herb stuffing for roast chicken
Grilled trout with rosemary stuffing
Baked scallops
Anchovy toasts

Lots of easy ways to bake your own bread, even though you're busy

Daily bread
Daily bread 2

Six seed rolls
Bread knots - another simple way to make beautiful and delicious rolls, using this dough, or your default dough

Yeast starter for bread - and the bread make your own sourdough starter

No-knead bread the famous NY Times recipe
Speeded-up no-knead bread and a different take on it

Yoghurt bread fabulous, easy, TRY IT
Quick oat loaf
Spelt bread - it's getting easier to buy this highly-flavoured flour

Anti-oxidant tea bread - I made this for my husband for a pre-surgery boost - delicious, too!

Yeast conversion - fresh/dried/quick

Keith Floyd's Lapin aux pruneaux (Sauté of wild rabbit with prunes and Armagnac)

Okay, so this is homage to Keith Floyd. Actually, it's straightforward French regional cooking, but when I think of Floyd, I think of fish and France. Whatever, it was utterly delicious.

In the 70s, my husband, an unlikely restaurateur, came back from Harvard Business School and started what he hoped would be a small chain of American hamburger joints (in the days when hamburger was, in Britain, synonymous with Wimpy, as that's all there was). Right around the corner from his restaurant at 2 The Mall, Clifton (there used to be peurile jokes on the fascia, viz, to them all, omnibus) was a wildly successful student dive run by a wildly flamboyant cook called Keith. The kitchen was more or less two rings at the back, there was plenty of cheap food and loads of booze. Keith was running his restaurant for the cooking and the craic, and not making much money. So he sold the restaurant to a couple who thought that they could do better: they'd clean it up, enlarge the kitchen, squeeze a few more tables into the basement ... and the crowd moved on, and it closed down.

In the 80s, newly married, I saw those first episodes of Floyd on Fish when they were broadcast in the West country, before he went national. Our telly was a tiny black and white affair, not very well tuned (I don't suppose we had an aerial on our roof, but our house on the cliff at Totterdown towered above Brunel's elegant curved railway station which must have helped). Despite these visual handicaps, it was easy to see that here was something different - the table set on the deck of that trawler, the huge wine glasses, the enthusiasm, the music, especially the music. You really couldn't imagine, say, Delia, using a theme tune by The Stranglers.

All in all, not difficult to join Julia from A Slice of Cherry Pie and James from Back to the Chopping Board to pay tribute to someone who brought so much fun to the kitchen.


















This traditional French way with rabbit is delicious ... and I was very amused to find on the Keith Floyd website that the details are not well worked out - the recipe published there is actually two jammed together, which meant that a certain amount of extemporising was necessary. I stuck with the original title, but I could have gone the other way, ditched the prunes, armagnac and cream in favour of white wine and tomatoes. Next time. Cheers, Keith.

Wild rabbit with prunes and Armagnac

If you don't like rabbit, this is good with chicken. But if you haven't tried rabbit, DO give it a go - so long as it is wild rabbit, not farmed, which has a tendency to taste of fish, whilst being flabby ... none of the virtues. Wild rabbit, on the other hand, has had a good life, is tasty (much tastier than even the priciest chicken), firm, and very very cheap.

• Rabbit – jointed
• Stoned prunes
• Finely diced shallots
• Finely crushed garlic
• Diced bacon
• Peeled small onions or shallots
• Chicken stock
• Armagnac or brandy
• Thyme
• Oil for frying
• Flour for dusting
• Salt/pepper
• Butter for frying
• Parsley
• Butter
• Double cream

You might like little round onions for this, in which case peel them. Otherwise chop a large onion and sweat it in a little oil with the diced bacon. When they're nearly done, add a little chopped garlic. Do this in a heavy-based casserole. Meanwhile, dust the rabbit joints with seasoned flour (you could put a little mustard powder in for extra depth of flavour), and brown them in butter and oil in a frying pan. When they are done, add Armagnac to the pan - if you are Keith, you flame it; if you are me, you can't get the liquor to light (but it doesn't really matter). Chuck all this into the casserole, with prunes (soaked, if necessary) and chopped thyme. Pour in a little chicken stock. (Would it be boasting to say that I used grouse stock? I thought it was a suitably flamboyant touch, in view of my failure with the flambéing.)

Simmer for 40 minutes. When it's done, add a splash of cream. Mmm


Related posts

Prune and armagnac tart

Roast grouse with bread sauce

Last week, looking at the butcher's display, I realised I have never cooked grouse. Now, it will be hard to resist ... delicious, an easy treat ... but, of course, ruinously expensive. Cheaper than a restaurant, and much much nicer - I've been off restaurants for years*, really. It began, I think, when I saw Gordon Ramsay making something on telly with a slice of processed "bread" from a plastic bag. How do you earn Michelin stars if you don't know anything about bread? The prejudice was confirmed at the gastropub where my daughter worked all last year - fabulous food, except that it was all always thoroughly oversalted.

Buying two young grouse was the easy part. How to cook them? I thought Lady Maclean's Cookbook would be a good place to start, but she and her upper crust Highland friends all assumed you knew how to roast a grouse, and were full of suggestions for what to do when you'd got fed up and wanted a change: grouse salad, anyone? perhaps a little devilled grouse? So I read everything Hugh FW wrote in Meat, and then followed the cooking (but not preparation) instructions given by Norman Tebbit in his wonderful new The Game Cook.

Of course, if you're eating game birds, then you've got to have bread sauce, which is a doddle providing you have proper white bread on hand. You just peel a shallot or two (or an onion), put it in some milk with a couple of cloves and some bay leaves, heat it up a little and leave it to steep. You do this early in the day. When it's nearly dinner time, you strain the milk and chuck in your white breadcrumbs, let them expand, then check the seasoning. Another of those things which is not much more difficult than the processed equivalent, yet 100x better.

As for the grouse, it roasts quickly with a minimum of fuss. I cooked ours during the first half of the England match, and we ate it at half time - well, actually, we missed a bit of the second half. And when the match was over, we had a little cheese with the last of the oatcakes I made the other day.

Roast grouse

one grouse per person
one apple per grouse
streaky bacon
a slice of good white bread per bird
paté de foie gras (in the absence of grouse livers)
oil
wine and stock for the gravy

Heat the oven to 190C.

Cut the apples and put them into the grouse. Cover the birds with streaky bacon (stretch it first on the back of your knife; it will crisp quicker). Roast on a rack in a tin, if possible. After 20-25 minutes, take off the bacon, then return the birds to the oven for 10 minutes to brown. Let them stand for 10 minutes before eating.

While they are standing, fry the bread in hot oil, and spread with the foie gras or fried grouse livers (we were not lucky enough to get any giblets with our birds). At the same time, make gravy with some fortified wine and good stock - I used some homemade trotter gear, which makes everything it touches silky smooth and flavoursome.

Serve with redcurrant jelly, watercress or steamed cabbage, and some little roasted potatoes. On hot plates. Make sure to save the bones for stock. That's today's task.




*I'll make an exception for Leon, where the food is always exactly what you want, and Pizza Express, Alfred's favourite; both serving proper food at decent prices. But that's lunch, not dinner. Actually, I'm not really that bah humbug, I enjoy a meal out as much as the next cook. It's just that I think we mostly do rather better at home. And definitely last night.

Open season for pheasant

Today is the first day of the pheasant season. In anticipation of joys to come, I'm reading Norman Tebbit's The Game Cook. There's lots of basic information for people who've never cooked game, but also some new ideas for ways to cook pheasant. It'll be a week or so before there are any pheasant fit to eat, and then I'll be forced to choose: Highland pheasant (with haggis and a slug of whisky), pheasant with beetroot, potato and parsnip (quite a few of my personal favourites in one dish), with red cabbage, with apples and cream? But we'll probably start the season with pheasant and pigs' trotters ... an inspired idea for overcoming the dry leanness of pheasant.

In the mean time, the pheasants that live round here seem to know life's a little trickier today than it was yesterday: it's the first day for months that I haven't seen a single pheasant. I won't see many in the garden or on the roads round here until February. It happens every year, and I always find myself wondering if they have some sort of Jungian collective memory ...

Free Rice game

Just in case you thought this morning's post was too serious, here's a game you can play - and whenever you get it right, 10 grains of rice will be distributed through the UN. It's paid for by the advertisers on the site, and the idea is to improve people's English as well as alleviate hunger. It's called Free Rice, and it's horribly addictive.

Thanks to Culinate.