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Sippets for Garnishing Dishes
Ordinary sippets are simply made by cutting stale bread into slices the third of an inch thick, toasting these on both sides to a bright brown, cutting them into small three-cornered pieces, and placing them round the dish. When properly made, they are fried in hot fat until brown and crisp, instead of being toasted, and are then drained and dried for use. In order to make them stiok to the dish, make a paste with the whisked white of an egg beaten up with a little flour; brush the under part of the sippet with the paste, and stick it on the dish. If the latter is very hot, the sippets will not adhere.
A Victorian garnish rather than a dish: triangles of fried or toasted bread set around the rim of a platter, most often with mince, hash, stewed kidneys or a ragout. A few details in the wording need translating.
- The thickness mattersA third of an inch is about 8 mm. Thinner and the sippet curls and burns in the fat; thicker and it stays soft in the middle instead of drying crisp.
- Stale bread, and whyDay-old close-crumbed white bread has lost enough moisture to fry crisp quickly and hold a clean cut edge. Fresh bread soaks up fat and goes greasy.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat" and gives no figure; modern deep-frying for bread of this thickness usually falls around 350-375F. Below that the bread absorbs fat before it colours; much above it and the outside browns while the centre stays damp.
- "Dried for use"After draining, the sippets were left to dry off completely before use; the recipe gives no method or temperature. Thorough drying is what keeps them crisp on the rim of a hot dish rather than going limp within minutes.
- The egg-white pasteWhisked white with just enough flour to make a thin gum, brushed on the underside. It is a glue, not a sauce, and it is not cooked. If the dish will be eaten rather than looked at, use a pastry-brush smear of nothing more than a little butter or leave the sippets loose.
- The hot-dish problemThe final line is the hinge: the paste sets by drying, and a very hot platter drives the moisture off too fast for it to grip. Glue the sippets to a cool or barely warm dish, let them set, then fill.
- QuantityNo yield is given. One large slice cut into quarters and then diagonals gives eight triangles; two to three slices border a standard oval platter.
- Modern equivalentsThese are croutes, the same thing served today under game birds or around a stew. Cassell's distinction between toasted ("ordinary") and fried ("properly made") still holds -- fried has the richer flavour and keeps its crispness far longer.
Sippet is generally traced to sop, the piece of bread dipped in wine, broth or gravy that was standard eating equipment in medieval and early modern England, long before it became decoration; the derivation is usually given as a possible diminutive rather than a settled fact. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century, the sop had shrunk to the sippet: no longer the vehicle for the sauce but a formal border round the edge of the platter, part of the elaborate presentation expected of a well-dressed dish. The instruction to glue them down with egg-white paste belongs squarely to that world, where a dish was carried to the table whole and had to survive the journey from kitchen to dining room looking exactly as the cook had arranged it.