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Steamed Bread
THRIFT demands that every bit of food be utilized. If you happen to have stale Bread on hand, freshen it by steaming. The section of a loaf, single slices or rolls are placed over rapidly boiling water and closely covered. This may be done in a regular steamer or by putting a colander above boiling water. Steamed Bread is palatable and affords variety.
This is not a recipe for a loaf. It is a method for reviving stale bread over boiling water, and it occupies a page in a book about baking because the book is also making an argument about thrift.
- Not steamed brown breadThe title misleads a modern reader. Steamed bread in the New England sense is a batter of rye, cornmeal and molasses cooked in a sealed mould for hours, and it is a different dish entirely. Nothing is being made on this page; bread that already exists is being warmed and remoistened.
- Why it works, and for how longBread goes stale because its starch slowly recrystallizes, not because it dries out. Heat and moisture together reverse a good deal of that, which is why steam does more for a loaf than a dry oven does. The effect is temporary, and a steamed loaf stales again faster than it did the first time, so steam only what will be eaten within the hour.
- Stale is not spoiledSteaming addresses age and nothing else. It does not deal with mold, and heat does not neutralize what mold leaves behind. In a soft loaf the visible spots are the smallest part of what is there, so a moldy loaf is finished, whatever the page says about using every bit of food.
- The setupA colander or sieve set over an inch of hard-boiling water with a tight lid is exactly right and needs nothing special. Keep the bread clear of the water itself. A few minutes will do for slices and longer for a whole section of loaf, and the crust will soften, which is the price of the method.
- Before it gets that farRefrigeration is the fastest way to stale bread; the starch recrystallizes quicker just above freezing than at room temperature. A loaf that will not be eaten within two days is better wrapped and frozen, where staling very nearly stops.
Bread was the largest single item in most household food budgets, and in a kitchen that baked several loaves at a time there was always some going hard at the end of the week. The ways of using it up reach well past this page: the booklet’s own neighboring recipe is a steamed bread pudding, and before that come toast, crumbs and the dozen dishes built on them. What is quietly odd here is who printed it. A yeast company had every commercial reason to want more baking rather than less, and instead it spends a page teaching a cook to get one more meal out of bread already made. Thrift was not a minor theme in the American kitchen writing of the period. It was close to a moral argument, and the booklet makes it in the first word on the page.