Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bread Fried for Soup
Bread Fried for Soup
Take one or two slices of stale bread a quarter of an inch thick. Remove the crust and cut them into small dice not more than a quarter of an inch square. Half fill an iron saucepan with frying fat and let this boil, which it will do when it is still, and a blue smoke rises from it. Put the sippets a few at a time into a frying basket, plunge them into the fat, and shake them about until they are a golden brown colour. Turn them upon kitchen paper to free them from grease, take another spoonful and proceed as before until a sufficient quantity of sippets are fried. Put the fried bread upon a dish covered with a napkin, and hand round with the soup. Sometimes the sippets are put into the soup tureen, and the soup is poured over them.
Croutons, cut small and fried in deep fat. The only real trap is the book's method of judging the fat, which by modern standards is too hot.
- "Let this boil" — it does notFat does not boil at frying temperature; the stillness the author describes is simply the moment the surface moisture has gone. Judge it with a thermometer instead: 350–375F browns the dice in under a minute.
- Blue smoke is past the pointVisible blue smoke means the fat has reached its smoke point and is breaking down, which gives an acrid taste and a scorched crust before the centre dries. Ignore that cue and go by temperature or by a test cube that sizzles at once and colours in about 40 seconds.
- SippetsAn old term for small pieces of bread served with soup or gravy — here the quarter-inch dice, elsewhere triangles or fingers. The word survives mainly in Victorian cookbooks; "crouton" has taken its place.
- The fatThe recipe says only 'frying fat'; in a Victorian kitchen this would commonly have been beef dripping or lard. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works, and dripping still gives the best savour if you have it. Half filling a deep pan is more than you need for a couple of slices; two inches is enough, and leaves headroom when the bread goes in.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old crumb holds its shape and absorbs less fat. Fresh bread collapses and comes out greasy, which is why the recipe specifies stale and why draining on paper is not optional.
- A few at a timeCrowding the basket drops the fat temperature and the dice steam rather than crisp. Fry in small batches and let the fat come back to heat between them.
- Yield and keepingTwo slices give roughly a cup of dice, enough for a few bowls depending on how generously you scatter them. They keep a day in a tin but lose their edge; refresh in a 350F oven for a few minutes.
- ServingHanded round separately, they stay crisp. Put into the tureen under the soup, as the second method allows, and they soften almost immediately — fine if you want them that way, but decide before the soup is poured.
Frying bread to serve with soup is one of the oldest uses for a stale loaf, and the vocabulary here is older than the book: "sippet" appears in English cookery writing from the sixteenth century onward, usually for a small piece of bread or toast dipped in or served alongside something liquid. It can be read as a foundation lesson in deep frying, taught on the cheapest possible material, where the cook learns to read the fat and to work in small batches before risking a cutlet or a fritter. The instruction to judge readiness by stillness and blue smoke reflects a kitchen without thermometers, where the eye was the only gauge.