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Cheese, Crusts for, or Pulled Bread
Pull the crumb of a new loaf into small rough pieces, place them on a dish or tin plate, and put them into a quick oven till they are lightly browned and crisp. If the oven is not hot they may be browned before a clear fire in a Dutch oven. The crumb of a half-quartern loaf will make enough for six persons.
Pulled bread is a two-ingredient exercise in surface area: torn crumb, dried hard in a hot oven, served with cheese in place of a biscuit. The only thing that can go wrong is tearing bread that is too stale to pull.
- Use genuinely fresh bread"A new loaf" means bread baked that day, still soft and elastic in the middle. Fresh crumb tears into ragged, feathery lumps that crisp beautifully; day-old bread crumbles or cuts into blocks instead, and the finished crusts are dull.
- A quick oven is 425-450FA quick oven -- the book gives no temperatures; a "quick" oven was generally reckoned hot, somewhere around 400-450F in modern terms. Spread the pieces in a single layer on a baking sheet and watch them, turning once, until they are pale gold and dry through to the centre. They should snap, not bend.
- Half-quartern loafThe old baker's quartern loaf weighed about 4 lb, so a half-quartern is roughly a 2 lb loaf. That is a large modern sandwich loaf, and the book reckons its crumb alone at six servings.
- Dutch ovenHere this means the tin reflector screen that stood open-faced before a coal fire, not a lidded cast-iron pot. The modern equivalent of the alternative method is a grill or broiler on a low setting, watched constantly, since the pieces darken in seconds.
- Tear, never sliceThe point of the dish is the irregular torn surface, which is what browns and crisps. Pull the crumb apart with your fingers into pieces roughly the size of a walnut and resist tidying them up.
- Dry, not toastedAim for crispness all the way through rather than colour. A piece that is brown outside and still soft inside will soften again, while one dried through will keep in a tin.
- ServingThese were handed round with the cheese course, buttered or plain, as a lighter substitute for water biscuits. They also stand in usefully for croutons or a cheeseboard cracker today.
Pulled bread belonged to the Victorian and Edwardian cheese course, where the convention was something dry and neutral to carry the cheese rather than anything sweet or seasoned. Its appeal to a large household was economy: the crumb of a big loaf, which might otherwise go stale before it was eaten, was turned into a keeping item. The instruction to brown the pieces "before a clear fire in a Dutch oven" dates the entry as much as anything in it -- a clear fire is one burned down past its smoke, and the Dutch oven in question is the open tin reflector that stood on the hearth, used in kitchens where the range oven was unreliable or not worth lighting for a small job.