Imperial Rings
Cut stale bread in one-third inch slices. Stamp out circles three inches in diameter; with a smaller cutter (size of top of pepper shaker) cut out center, leaving rings about one-third inch wide. Brush with melted butter, sprinkle lightly with salt and paprika, and brown delicately in the oven. Serve in a circle overlapping each other on a plate covered with a doily.
A garnish-course crouton from a Sunday-dinner book that liked its plates arranged. The whole trick is uniform thickness and an oven low enough to dry the bread through before the surface colours.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumed you would judge the oven. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, suits the instruction to "brown delicately"; watch them rather than trusting a fixed time. Anything hotter browns the butter before the centre of the crumb is crisp.
- Stale bread is not optionalFresh bread compresses under a cutter and tears when you remove the centre. Day-old to two-day-old bread of a close, firm crumb -- a plain white sandwich loaf rather than an open-crumbed artisan loaf -- cuts clean rings.
- CuttersA 3-inch round cutter for the outside. The recipe's two measurements do not agree: rings "about one-third inch wide" imply a centre cutter of roughly 2 1/3 inches, while "size of top of pepper shaker" suggests something under an inch. Choose whichever ring width you want and cut accordingly.
- Butter applicationBrush both sides, not just the top, or the underside stays pale and leathery. Melted butter only; softened butter drags the crumb.
- PaprikaIn this period paprika was used as a colour more than a flavour -- sweet Hungarian, sprinkled thin. Modern smoked paprika will overwhelm what is essentially a bread garnish.
- YieldA standard sandwich loaf yields roughly 16-20 rings, so figure two or three per person as an accompaniment to soup, creamed dishes or a salad course. The cut-out centres brown alongside them and make small croutons.
- The doilyA paper doily under the rings would have soaked up butter and helped stop them sliding. A wire rack for five minutes before plating does the job better.
- StorageFully dried rings keep several days in a tin and re-crisp in a 300F oven. Underbaked ones go soft within the hour.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American menu books that planned a household's Sunday meal down to the garnish, and Imperial Rings are pure garnish -- a way of turning the end of a loaf into something that looked composed on the plate. Shaped fried and toasted breads had been standard in professional kitchens for a century, where croutons were cut into crescents, diamonds and rings to border an entree or prop up a serving of creamed sweetbreads; books like this one carried the practice into middle-class dining rooms, where the trimmed circle and the linen doily signalled that the cook had taken trouble. The name looks decorative rather than descriptive: "imperial" was applied freely to dishes in this period, generally as a mark of elegance rather than any connection to a court or a country. What the recipe really records is a period habit of thrift dressed as refinement -- stale bread, butter, salt and a dusting of paprika, arranged in an overlapping ring."}