Croutons
Cut stale bread in one-third inch slices; remove crusts and cut in one-third inch strips, cut strips in one-third inch cubes. Fry them a golden brown in deep hot Cottolene. Drain on brown paper and sprinkle lightly with salt.
A one-line recipe with almost nothing to go wrong, provided the fat is at the right temperature and the bread is genuinely stale.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, heavily promoted in American cookbooks around 1900, often by the recipe collections themselves. Any neutral frying oil or a mix of oil and clarified butter gives the same result.
- Fat temperatureDeep-fry at 350-365F. Cooler and the cubes drink oil before they colour; hotter and the outsides brown while the centres stay soft. They take under a minute, so work in small batches and lift them the moment they are golden.
- Stale bread mattersFresh bread has too much moisture and collapses into greasy sponge. Use bread a day or two old, or dry the cut cubes uncovered for an hour first.
- Even diceThe third-inch dimension is repeated three times for a reason: uniform cubes brown at the same rate. Anything much smaller burns before the interior dries.
- Brown paperSubstitute a wire rack set over a tray. Paper towel works but the underside softens if the croutons sit on it.
- SaltingSalt while still glossy with oil so it adheres. Do it on the rack, not in the pan.
- Yield and useFour slices of sandwich bread give roughly two cups, enough to garnish soup for six. They keep two or three days in a tin but lose crispness in anything airtight and warm; a few minutes in a 300F oven revives them.
- Oven methodIf you would rather not deep-fry, toss the cubes with oil and bake at 375F for 10-12 minutes, shaking the pan once. The texture is drier and less rich than the fried version the book intends.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was published or subsidised by a food manufacturer, and the repeated appearance of Cottolene through its pages is the tell: the book exists in part to persuade cooks that a cottonseed-oil shortening could replace lard in every application, including deep frying. Croutons themselves are far older than the book and older than the word's arrival in English, which came from the French crofbtton, a little crust. The dish is essentially thrift made presentable, turning bread too dry to serve into a garnish for soup and salad, and it appears in a menu-based collection like this one because a Sunday dinner of the mid-1910s was expected to open with soup, which was often accompanied by something crisp alongside.