Crusts
Cut stale sandwich bread lengthwise in one-inch thick slices and remove crusts. Cut slices in bars one inch wide and six inches long. Bake in a hot oven until delicately browned. Turn them so that crusts may brown evenly on all sides. Serve hot and crisp.
A one-ingredient recipe that lives or dies on the bread and the oven. The point is a bar that dries all the way through, not a toasted stick with a soft middle.
- "Hot oven"Read this as somewhere in the 425-450F region. Go by eye rather than by the clock: inch-thick bars can pass from pale gold to bitter quickly, and the recipe asks only that they be delicately browned, with a turn partway through.
- A slower route to a drier crustIf you want them crisp to the centre rather than merely browned, a moderate oven of around 300-325F will dry them through before the surface darkens, though inch-thick bars may need considerably longer than a quick bake. The original's hot oven gives colour fast but can leave the middle chewy.
- Sandwich bread, 1913This means a close-crumbed white pan loaf, firmer and less sweet than most supermarket sliced bread today. A plain white sandwich loaf or a pain de mie works; avoid anything enriched with sugar or milk powder, which scorches.
- Stale is not optionalDay-old bread cuts cleanly into inch-thick slices and loses moisture evenly. Fresh bread compresses under the knife and steams in the oven instead of drying.
- "Crusts" here means the cut facesThe loaf's own crusts are removed first; the browned surfaces formed in the oven are what the recipe calls crusts. Turning the bars once or twice gives all four long faces the same colour.
- YieldCut lengthwise, a standard loaf gives only a few inch-thick slices, and each slice a handful of 1 x 6-inch bars once the crusts are off. Expect somewhere between a dozen and twenty, depending entirely on the size of the loaf.
- Serving and keepingThe recipe asks only that they go to the table hot and crisp; soup or a salad course is the obvious place for them. Thoroughly dried bars will keep for some days in a tin, and can be refreshed for a few minutes in a warm oven.
Bread served as a dry, crisp accessory to soup runs through Anglo-American cookery well before this book: rusks, zwieback, melba toast and the fried croûton all work the same principle of driving moisture out of yesterday's loaf so it can be kept, carried, or dipped. 52 Sunday Dinners is a menu book, organising the year into complete Sunday meals, and small items like this exist to fill out a course rather than stand alone. The instruction to cut lengthwise, in bars of a stated width and length, suggests a period preoccupation with uniformity at the table.