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Bread, Sippets Of
Cut slices of stale bread about the third of an inch thick, and trim into any form required. Fry them in butter till some are dark, but not burnt, and some a light brown. When they are crisp, lay them on a cloth to dry. When wanted to adhere to the edge of a dish, dip the end in a mixture of white of egg and flour. If the dish be made very hot the sippets will not stay in their places.
A garnish rather than a dish: fried bread croutons cut to shape, sometimes glued around the rim of a platter as a border. A few details in the instructions only make sense once you know what the sippets are for.
- The hinge: stale breadFresh bread is too soft and too wet; it soaks up butter and collapses instead of crisping. Use bread a day or two old, or dry the slices in a 300F oven for a few minutes before frying.
- Thickness and shapeA third of an inch is about 8 mm. "Any form required" would have covered shapes such as triangles, diamonds, crescents or half-hearts, cut with a knife or a tin cutter, chosen to suit the dish they were to edge.
- Butter alone will brown too fastAt the heat needed to crisp bread, whole butter's milk solids scorch before the centre dries. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, gives the two shades the recipe asks for without bitterness.
- Two colours on purposeThe recipe does not say why two shades are wanted; the likeliest explanation is that dark and light sippets were alternated around the edge of a dish for contrast. Fry them in separate batches rather than trying to pull one pan out at two stages.
- Draining"Lay them on a cloth" is a wire rack or paper towel now. Do not stack them while warm or the trapped steam softens the crust.
- The egg-and-flour pasteWhite of egg beaten with just enough flour to make a thick glue. Dip only the end that touches the dish, and press the sippets on while the paste is still tacky.
- Why a hot dish defeats youThe recipe says only that the sippets will not stay in place on a very hot dish. The likely reasons are that the egg white sets and dries before it has gripped, and that butter from the sippet melts at the joint. Apply the border to a warm or cool dish and heat gently afterwards if at all.
- QuantityNo yield is given. A loaf will produce far more trimmed sippets than a single dish border needs; fry them not long before serving.
"Sippet" is a diminutive of "sop" and dates to well before this book: a small piece of bread for dipping in broth, gravy or wine. By the time Cassell's was compiling its dictionary, the word had narrowed to the fried or toasted bread shapes used to garnish made dishes, hashes, minces, ragouts and thick soups. Sippets seem to have been treated as a basic technique rather than a dish, a thing every cook needed to be able to turn out on demand, in the same class as browned crumbs or a fried parsley garnish. The modern crouton is the same thing under a French name, but the decorative cut shapes and the egg-white glue belonged to a style of service, food arranged for the eye on a platter carried to the table, that largely disappeared with the staff who assembled it.