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Bread--Crumbs, Fried
Put some thin slices of bread into an oven when the fire has gone low, and let them stay all night; roll them next morning into crumbs. Put into a frying-pan some butter or lard, and when it is on the point of boiling, add the bread-crumbs. Stir them till they are of a clear brown colour. Take them out with a slice, and put them on blotting-paper before the fire, to draw away all the fat; or they may be browned in a gentle oven without butter. Bread-crumbs so prepared are useful for serving with game of any sort.
A technique entry rather than a dish, and the sort of thing a Victorian kitchen made from stale ends of loaf. Two details carry it: the bread must be bone dry before frying, and the crumbs must come out of the pan a shade lighter than you want them.
- Drying the bread"An oven when the fire has gone low" is the residual heat of a range left overnight, which would have been low and steadily falling; no thermometer figure can be recovered from the instruction. A modern equivalent is a very low oven, around 200F, for an hour or two until the slices snap rather than bend, then cool before rolling.
- Rolling into crumbs"Roll" implies a rolling pin over the dried slices; sieving afterwards gives an even, sandy crumb, though the recipe does not call for it. A food processor does the same in seconds; pulse rather than run it, or you get flour at the bottom and shards on top.
- "On the point of boiling"Butter does not boil as water does; what the phrase describes is the stage when the foaming of the water content has subsided and the fat is shimmering, just before the milk solids colour. Clarified butter is more forgiving here, since whole butter's solids darken faster than the crumbs do.
- They turn fastDried crumbs go from pale to clear brown to burnt in well under a minute at the end. Stir without stopping and pull the pan off the heat while they are still a stage lighter than you want, as carryover heat finishes them.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper on a plate. Drain them spread out in a single layer, not heaped, or the ones underneath steam and go soft.
- The oven methodThe fat-free alternative the recipe mentions works well: a "gentle oven" was never a fixed temperature, but somewhere around 300F is a reasonable modern reading, crumbs spread thin on a tray, stirred every few minutes until evenly bronzed.
- Quantity and keepingThe recipe gives no quantities. Once fully cold the crumbs keep for a few days in an airtight jar and can be refreshed briefly in a low oven, though crumbs fried in butter or lard will not keep as long as those browned dry.
- ServingTraditionally handed separately in a small dish with roast game, to be spooned over the meat at table rather than scattered in the kitchen, where they would soften in the gravy.
Fried crumbs belong to the standard English service of roast game birds, where grouse, partridge or pheasant came to table with bread sauce, gravy and a dish of browned crumbs, and later with game chips as well. Bread does double duty on such a plate: boiled with milk and onion for the sauce, dried and fried for the crumbs. Dried crumbs of this sort were often said to be raspings, a term generally traced to the older practice of rasping the hard crust off a baked loaf with a file-like grater and saving the powder for coating and garnishing, though raspings properly meant the grated crust rather than crumbs dried and fried. Either way, it is a reminder of how systematically a Victorian kitchen turned the stale loaf back into something useful.