Sauces and Stuffings for English Dishes

‘The English have but one sauce.’ A libel, of course, today and a libel in fact since the fourteenth century. It arose from the sticky white sauce with which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century innkeepers and boardinghouse landladies used to smother badly cooked cauliflower or macaroni (with a little cheese added). Even at that time it was a libel, since both served bread sauce with chicken and onion sauce with mutton, and these, if well made, are excellent white sauces.