Croutons
Remove the crusts from stale bread, cut into small squares, and brown in the oven or fry in boiling fat, and put into pea soup.
A two-line instruction that still works exactly as written; the only real variables are fat, cut size and how dry the bread is to begin with.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe specifies none. In a modern oven, something around 375F for 10-15 minutes, turning once, will brown them evenly; much hotter and the corners tend to colour before the centres dry out.
- "Boiling fat"This means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the bread goes in, not fat at a literal boil — roughly 350-375F. Lard, beef dripping and clarified butter were all in common household use at the time; a neutral oil behaves the same way.
- Stale bread is the pointFresh crumb holds water, so it soaks up fat instead of crisping. Day-old or two-day-old bread, or fresh bread dried in a low oven first, is what makes the difference.
- Cut sizeHalf-inch dice is the practical size for soup: small enough to sit on a spoon, large enough to keep a crisp centre. Cut them evenly or the small ones will be black before the large ones colour.
- QuantityTwo or three slices of bread will generally do for four to six bowls of soup. Fully cooled and kept in a tin they will hold their crispness for several days, but lose their crackle in a sealed plastic container.
- When to add themThe recipe simply says to put them into the soup. In practice they are better scattered on at the table, since pea soup is thick and will soften them within a minute or two.
Croûton is simply the French diminutive of croûte, crust — a small crust — and the word appears to have settled into English cookery books, probably by the nineteenth century, as a name for fried or oven-dried bread served with soup. The practice long predates the word: bread was the usual thickener and garnish for pottages across medieval and early modern Europe, and the modern crouton is what survived after soups began to be thickened with flour, roux or purée instead. Its position here, tucked into the soup chapter with no ceremony, tells you how routine it was in a turn-of-the-century household: stale bread was never thrown out, and pea soup in particular — heavy, smooth, and monotonous in texture — wanted something crisp on top. Recipes of the period are often said to pair the two, along with fried bread dice for tomato and purée soups generally.