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Use of Stale Bread
Have a laundry bag made of white duck to hang in the kitchen, in which to keep all pieces of bread which come from the table without butter. When a number have been collected put into the dripping pan and carefully dry and brown in the oven. Roll them on a molding board until fine and sift through a very fine sieve. Keep in a glass jar or a tin can uncovered. If they are covered they will quickly become rancid, especially if there has been any butter on any of the pieces.
This is a method for turning table leftovers into dried breadcrumbs, the fine kind used for coating and gratins. The whole thing hinges on driving out every trace of moisture before the crumbs go into storage.
- The hinge: dry, not toastedThe hinge: dry all the way through -- The recipe asks for the bread to be dried and browned in the oven. What matters is that the pieces are dry to the centre, not just coloured on the surface; any residual softness will spoil the jar. No temperature or time is given in the original.
- Dripping panAn open roasting pan or a rimmed sheet pan. Spread the pieces in a single layer so they dry evenly rather than steaming each other.
- The laundry bagWhite duck is a heavy cotton canvas. A paper bag or an open bowl in a dry spot serves the same purpose, but do not let bread accumulate for more than a day or two in a warm kitchen — cloth holds humidity and crusts will mould before you get to them. Drying first and storing dry is the safer order of operations.
- Rolling and siftingThe recipe rolls the dried pieces on a molding board rather than in a bag; a rolling pin tends to give a coarser, more variable crumb than a food processor. Sift through a fine sieve as directed and re-crush the coarse remainder rather than discarding it.
- Uncovered storageThe advice to leave the jar open assumes a dry pantry and fully dried crumbs; the logic is that trapped moisture and any milkfat from buttered bread turn rancid fast. In a modern kitchen a sealed jar is better against pests and ambient humidity, provided the crumbs are genuinely dry. Fat-free crumbs keep for months; the freezer removes the question entirely.
- Butter really does matterThe instruction to save only unbuttered pieces is not fussiness. Butterfat oxidises and goes stale-tasting long before dry starch does, and it also makes crumbs clump when rolled.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; as a rough guide, a few slices of bread reduce to something on the order of a cup of fine dry crumbs, depending on slice size.
Crumbing stale bread is one of the oldest economies in the European kitchen, and it survives in this book because a household that bought or baked bread daily generated a steady surplus of dry ends. Fine dried crumbs were a staple of nineteenth-century cooking — for breading cutlets and croquettes, for topping scalloped dishes, for lining charlotte moulds and thickening puddings — and ready-made crumbs were not generally to be had. The instruction to hang a dedicated bag in the kitchen reflects the same systematic thriftiness that produced the drippings crock and the stock pot. The warning about butter is a reminder that before reliable refrigeration rancidity was a common way a stored food went bad, and cooks organised their storage around keeping fat and moisture apart from dry goods.