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Left-Over Bread Crusts
Bread crusts added to a soup or stew and well-boiled will make the best of thickening, the whole being passed through a sieve to ensure evenness.
Croutons are stale pieces of bread, dipped a second in cold water, cut into neat squares, and either fried or browned in the oven with a dot of butter on each.
When kidneys are floured, browned in dripping and water added, if several crusts are broken in and allowed to simmer with the meat, then well beaten with a fork, the gravy will be found deliciously thick.
Crusts may also be used in scalloped dishes, as scalloped tomatoes, cabbage, etc.
Cut crusts into small squares. Then make ordinary lemon jelly and while still hot pour over the crusts. When cold, the whole is turned out and served with either custard or cream.
Five short methods rather than one recipe, all aimed at using the ends of a loaf. None gives quantities, so treat them as techniques and scale to what you have.
- The hinge: dry crust, not freshThe recipe calls the crouton bread "stale," and dry crust is what suits the other uses too: it either dissolves entirely into liquid or crisps without going leathery. Fresh crust turns gummy in soup and steams rather than browns in the oven.
- The dip in cold waterThe recipe says only "dipped a second in cold water," presumably to soften the crust just enough to cut clean squares without shattering. Do not soak it; the bread wants to be damp on the surface only.
- Oven croutonsThe recipe gives no oven heat at all, only "browned in the oven"; a moderate oven, around 375F for 10-15 minutes, turning once, will do it. A dot of butter on each square is fussy work; tossing the cubes with melted butter gives the same result faster.
- Crusts as thickeningBread thickens by dissolving, which takes a good spell of gentle simmering; the recipe asks only that it be "well-boiled." The sieve is not optional in the soup version, as unsieved crust leaves pale lumps. For the kidney gravy, beating hard with a fork does the same job more coarsely.
- DrippingThe fat saved from roasting beef or pork. Any rendered animal fat works; butter will brown the flour too fast at the heat needed to sear kidneys.
- KidneysThe kind is not specified; lamb, veal or ox kidney would all suit. Halve them, cut out the white gristle, and it is usual to soak them in cold water or milk before flouring. They toughen if held at a hard boil, so keep the pan at a bare simmer while the crusts break down.
- Scalloped dishesHere the crust squares stand in for crumbs in a layered bake of tomatoes or cabbage; the recipe gives no oven heat or timing, so bake in a moderate oven until the liquid bubbles at the edges and the top layer is browned.
- The lemon jelly dish"Ordinary lemon jelly" means a sweetened lemon gelatin, not preserve. Pour it hot over the crust squares so the bread swells and sets in suspension, and leave it until cold and firm before turning out, as the recipe directs. No quantities are given, so scale the jelly to the crusts you have.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour. Pages like this one belong to a long tradition of frugality writing that runs through nineteenth-century domestic manuals: crusts, crumbs, dripping and bones all had assigned second lives. Bread was the standard thickener of medieval and early modern European cookery, long before the flour roux, and the word crouton is a diminutive of the French croûte, a crust. The lemon jelly dish at the end is a thrifty relation of the moulded charlotte and the various bread-and-jelly puddings that appear in Victorian cookbooks, packet gelatin having by then made such moulds cheap and reliable enough for a company dessert.