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A Crumb of Bread,
but save it and put with other pieces; if you have a loaf about to mold, cut in thin slices, place all together in a dripping-pan and set in oven to dry, and you will find that when pounded and rolled it will be very nice for dressing, stuffing, puddings, griddle-cakes, etc. When to be used for breading meats, etc., it must be made very fine. Keep in a covered box, or in a paper bag tied securely and hung in a dry place. It is much more economical to prepare meats with a dressing of some kind, since they "go so much further."
SAUSAGE TOAST is made by scalding the sausages in boiling water, frying to light brown, chop fine, and spread on bits of toast.
Two thrifty operations in one paragraph: turning stale bread into dried crumbs, and stretching a couple of sausages across several pieces of toast. The text begins mid-sentence because it is a continuation of the preceding entry on saving crumbs.
- Oven for dryingThe text says only "set in oven to dry." A low oven, in the region of 250-300F, with the door cracked so moisture escapes, will do it. The goal is bone-dry and barely coloured, not toasted; browned crumbs taste scorched in a pudding.
- Dripping-panThat is a shallow roasting or sheet pan. Spread the slices in a single layer rather than heaping them, or the middle stays leathery.
- Pounded and rolledThe recipe says only that the dried bread is pounded and rolled; a rolling pin, often with the crumbs wrapped in a cloth or bag, is the usual reading. A food processor does it in seconds; pulse to coarse crumbs for stuffing and dressing, and sift the fine dust out for breading, which fits the original's "made very fine."
- The hinge: truly dry before storingResidual moisture can leave the crumbs liable to mold in a closed box. They should rattle and feel dusty, not cool or soft, before they go into a container. A jar in the freezer keeps them a long time; the paper bag in a dry place works only in a genuinely dry room.
- Sausage for the toastNineteenth-century links were fresh, coarse, uncased or natural-cased pork. Fresh bulk or breakfast sausage is the right substitute; smoked or cured links do not need the scalding step and will be salty once reduced to a spread.
- Scalding then fryingThe boiling water is presumably to firm the links so they do not burst in the pan. The recipe says to fry only to light brown; cook the chopped meat through to 160F, since it is chopped after frying and any underdone centre gets redistributed.
Buckeye Cookery belongs to a generation of American household manuals in which waste was the cardinal sin, and this fragment appears among entries on using up leftovers. Dried bread crumbs were the pivot of that economy: they thickened puddings, bound stuffings, coated cutlets and bulked out griddle-cakes, and a cook who let a loaf mold had thrown away all of those. The closing remark that dressed meats "go so much further" is the plain arithmetic behind the whole approach, and sausage toast is the same arithmetic applied to breakfast, the links chopped fine and spread rather than served whole. The habit long predates the book; English and American cookery had used stale bread as a thickener well before the era of commercial breadcrumbs.