Celebrity square meals: Julian Fellowes' bread sauce

Serves 4

I like traditional food - not nursery puddings but straight English roasts and that sort of thing. I do chicken rubbed with a little butter and salt and roasted for about an hour and a half (cover it with foil for all but the last half hour) with sausages and bacon. You can't go wrong.

The gravy is very important - I like something rather more greasy spoonish than some chefs do, with juices, fat and a little flour. On no circumstances should it contain gravy mixture. You can get a mix for the stuffing, though.

The key factor with any such meal is bread sauce. In the Fifties, you'd never have had roast turkey or chicken without bread sauce. Now it's almost a dying pleasure, but it just isn't complicated.

Ingredients

1 small onion (half a normal-sized one)
1/2 pint full-fat milk
A knob of butter
Black pepper and a little salt
2 cloves
About 5 slices Mother's Pride white bread

Method

Chop the onion and melt the butter in a saucepan. Braise the onion until it is translucent but don't brown it. Add the milk, pepper, salt and cloves and let it all cook on a low gas - don't boil it. Remove the crusts from the bread and cut into three-quarter-inch squares. Add them until you get the consistency of a thick sauce - you don't want blobs of porridge on your plate. You may need to add more milk. Let it all cook for as long as you wish, and serve.

'Julian Fellowes Investigates a Most Mysterious Murder' is on BBC1, 27 Dec, 10pm and 30 Dec, 9.45pm