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Bread Sticks
1 cup scalded milk or water. 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup Cottolene. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 tablespoon sugar. 1/4 cup lukewarm water.
White 1 egg well beaten. 3¾ to 4 cups of flour.
Process: Put butter, salt and sugar in mixing bowl. Add milk. When lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake, white of egg, and flour, reserving one-half cup. Knead until smooth and elastic; cover and set to rise until light, then shape first in small balls, then roll in the board (without flour) with the hands until about seven inches in length, using care that they are of a uniform size, rounding the ends. They should be about the size of a lead pencil. Cover and let rise. Just before putting them in the oven, brush them over lightly with melted butter and sprinkle them with salt. Bake in a slow oven, browning them delicately.
The ingredient list has been garbled in setting — the yeast cake belongs in the quarter cup of lukewarm water, and the quarter cup of Cottolene is the fat the method later calls "butter." Read it that way and the dough behaves.
- The typo in the flour"334 to 4 cups" is 3 3/4 to 4 cups. Hold back the last half cup as instructed and add it only if the dough is slack.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the late nineteenth century, no longer made. Use 1/4 cup butter or a neutral solid shortening; butter gives the better flavour on a stick this thin.
- Yeast cakeOne cake is roughly one packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons. Dissolve it in the 1/4 cup lukewarm water and let it stand until foamy before it joins the dough.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. Low heat is deliberate here: it dries the sticks through to the centre so they snap rather than bend, and keeps them pale as the recipe asks. Expect 25 to 35 minutes, turning the pan once.
- Add the milk to the fat, not the yeastScalded milk poured onto butter, salt and sugar cools as it goes. Wait until the mixture is genuinely lukewarm — under about 110F — before the yeast and egg white go in.
- Rolling without flourThe bare board is the point. A trace of moisture on the wood gives the dough grip so it lengthens evenly; flour makes the rope skid and split. Roll from the centre outward with flat palms.
- The second riseKeep it short, 15 to 20 minutes. Pencil-thin sticks over-proof fast and will collapse to flat ribbons in the oven.
- YieldSeveral dozen seven-inch sticks, depending how thin you roll them. They soften within a day; recrisp at 300F for five minutes.
Thin, hard bread sticks came into American cookbooks by way of Italian grissini, the pencil-shaped Turin bread. Cottolene was a cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening promoted heavily by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the firm sponsored cookbooks and recipe pamphlets that named the product — a reminder that a good deal of turn-of-the-century domestic cookery reached readers with a brand attached.