With Roast Chicken, turkey or game, there is a compulsory sauce named Bread Sauce.
It is a peculiarity.
Heady with cloves, wafting with onion and well… milky, but thick and pallid. Neither prose nor photography can do it justice. Imagine trying to persuade someone to eat it. It’s a tough one.

Yet it is also a fundamental part of our roast dinners. Christmas without bread sauce is unthinkable. Sunday roast lunch without bread sauce is heinous. Nothing sings alongside a bird like bread sauce does.

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Take a smallish onion and stud it with cloves about 1/2″ apart. Many recipes suggest using 2 or 3 cloves. This is lily-livered madness. It shouldn’t whisper “a breath of clove”; it should punch you in the face.

Cut the onion in half and place the clove-studded beauty into a small saucepan and pour around 1/2 pint of milk over it. Bring to the boil, then turn off the heat and leave it to steep for at least an hour – a whole morning will no it no harm.

When the time approaches, add 2oz breadcrumbs. That is, 2oz of crusts-cut-off bread reduced to crumbs in a food processor (or in my case, done in many batches in the tiny herb chopper because the food processor is on the top shelf of the larder and I’m damned if I’m washing that lot up and heaving it back up the stepladder for 2oz of bread)

Add a nice knob of butter and some salt and white pepper and bring to a simmer – stirring occasionally – until it thickens. Takes about 10 minutes.

Remove the clove-studded onion and discard. Do not confuse it with a pomander. It does not smell as good and will ruin your clothes. The obvious thing to do would be to remove it before adding the breadcrumbs, but it’s a family tradition to scrape the sauce off the onion, so that’s what I do.

Gently blanket your roasted bird with this luscious, warming sauce.

Don’t forget the gravy either.