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Bread-Sticks
Dissolve 1 cake of yeast in 1/2 cupful lukewarm water. Put in bread-pan 1 cupful milk, 1 cupful boiling water, and 1 cupful warm water. The temperature of the whole will be lukewarm. Sift in enough flour to make stiff enough to handle; knead until it no longer sticks to the pan or fingers. Sift flour on bread-board and knead some time. Place back in greased bread-pan and allow to rise for three hours. Knead again well into long, thin sticks to fit bread-stick-pan, brush with melted butter, and bake ten minutes. Serve as a side-dish in long, narrow glasses at dinner.
A plain lean dough — flour, water, milk, yeast — shaped into grissini. The original assumes you know your oven and your pans, so the two numbers it leaves out are the ones worth settling first.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and ten minutes only makes sense in a hot oven: 425–450F. At 350F the sticks will dry out slowly and stay pale rather than crisping.
- The yeast cake"One cake" meant a block of compressed fresh yeast; period cakes varied in size, so the equivalent is approximate. Substitute about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast, dissolved in the half cup of lukewarm water as directed.
- Salt is absentThe recipe lists none. Modern palates will find the sticks flat; 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of salt for this quantity of dough is standard, added with the flour rather than the yeast water.
- Flour quantity"Enough flour to make stiff enough to handle," against the 3 1/2 cups of liquid here (counting the half cup the yeast is dissolved in), will take somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 cups. Keep the dough on the firm, dry side -- a slack dough will not hold a thin stick shape.
- The three-hour riseThat figure belongs to a cool kitchen and a cake of yeast. In a warm modern room the dough will be fully risen in 1 1/2 to 2 hours; judge by doubling, not by the clock.
- Shaping and a second restAfter shaping, give the sticks 15 to 20 minutes on the pan before baking. The original moves straight to the oven, which yields a denser, harder stick — acceptable, but the short rest gives a lighter crumb.
- Bread-stick panA ridged pan with long troughs, still sold for baguettes and grissini. A flat sheet works; the sticks spread a little wider and brown less evenly on the underside.
- CrispnessTen minutes gives a soft, bread-like stick meant to be eaten at once. For the dry, snappable kind, bake 15 to 18 minutes until deeply golden and let them cool fully on a rack.
- YieldExpect three to four dozen sticks about eight inches long, enough for a large table.
Serving bread-sticks upright in long, narrow glasses, as this recipe directs, appears in American cookbooks of this period, and such sticks are usually likened to Italian grissini, which are generally traced to Piedmont and Turin. The dough here is the plainest possible, so the effect depends on even shaping and a hot, well-judged oven. Salt is simply absent from the ingredient list.