Saucer (soh-say not sor-ser)

I don't know how things are in Anglo-Saxon circles these days, but when I pulled out at age 33 I had never mopped up my gravy with a piece of bread.
At least not in polite company.

Here, happily, such behaviour is, to coin a phrase, de rigeur.
As much part of the great French cultural heritage as, say, peeing at the side of the road.
Anybody seen leaving good gravy on his plate when there is good bread in the basket, must be assumed to be ill.
Or foreign, which comes to the...

There is even a special verb for it - saucer.

I have not read the details of the recent Unesco World Cultural Heritage award to French Gastronomy.
But I am sure mopping up the last of the gravy with fresh French bread must figure prominently.

Parting thot: "You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread." - Henry Miller