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Stale Bread: Sandwiches
Toasted Sandwiches.
Often after a picnic or entertainment a housewife has a number of bread-and-butter sandwiches left, too stale to serve. They may form the basis of a bread pudding or they make an attractive dish for breakfast, luncheon, or supper in the shape of toasted sandwiches. Do not take them apart, lay them between the wires of a toaster, and hold over a clear, red fire. The butter will melt and the inside be left soft, warm, and buttered, with the outside a crisp, golden brown.
Toast.
Trim the crust from stale slices you wish to toast and move it carefully over a clear, red fire for two minutes. Then turn it over and let all the moisture be drawn out of the bread. Butter and serve immediately.
Toast may be utilized, especially for breakfast, in all sorts of ways. Plain toast is a favorite in most households; then there are milk toast, cream toast, dropped eggs on toast, water toast, and the excellent dish of bread soaked in egg and milk which has all sorts of names, French, Spanish, German, and Scotch toast, but more properly egged toast. At the luncheon and dinner table toast appears in all forms-under chicken and with such vegetables as asparagus and spinach; under minced meats, fricassees, and creamed mixtures, or in the delicate canape.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Spider Browned Toast.
Take several slices of stale bread cut rather thick, cut off the crust and butter them on both sides. Lay them in a dry, hot spider over a rather slow fire and cover with a tight lid. When one side has browned delicately, turn and brown the other.
They will be crisp outside, yet soft inside.
Sandwiches in Cream Sauce.
Sandwiches left over are not usually inviting, but they may be made so by this method. Toast them delicately in the oven, and to every four sandwiches made from chicken, veal, or tongue makes a white sauce with 1 tablespoonful flour, ½ teaspoonful salt, a dash of pepper, and 1 cupful milk cooked until thick. Then add the yolk of 1 egg, well beaten. Pour this over the sandwiches and serve at once.
White-Bread Brewis.
Heat a pint of milk in a double boiler. Stir into it enough bits of stale wheat bread to absorb all the milk. Season with a little butter and salt. It should not be pasty or sloppy, but should be a light, dry porridge. It is a favorite with children, especially if served on a small, pretty saucer and dotted with bits of bright jelly. Serve hot.
Bread-Crumb Buckwheat Cakes. cupful stale bread crumbs, 2 cupfuls milk, teaspoonful salt, cake yeast, cupfuls buckwheat flour, 1 tablespoonful molasses, 1 teaspoonful soda.
Scald the milk and soak the crumbs for half an hour. Add the salt, yeast, and buckwheat flour, and let it stand over night. In the morning stir in the molasses and soda melted in a spoonful of warm water. Beat briskly for a few minutes and bake on a hot, greased griddle.
Brown-Bread Cream Toast with Cheese. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful milk, cupful grated cheese, 1 egg, 1 cupful cheese.
Make a white sauce from the milk, butter, and flour; when it boils, add the grated cheese and well-beaten egg. Cook slowly until mixed, then add a cupful of cheese, cut into small cubes. Season with salt and cayenne, and pour over slices of toasted brown bread.
Fried Bread. 3 slices stale bread, 1 egg, 6 tablespoonfuls milk, 2 tablespoonfuls oil (olive).
Cut the bread into fingers three inches wide and the length of the slice. Beat the egg slightly, add the milk. Dip the bread in the mixture.
Put the oil in a spider and allow it to grow hot. Drop the bread in and sauté till brown. Drain on soft paper. Arrange log-cabin fashion, and serve with a sweet liquid sauce or maple sirup.
Milk Toast. 6 slices stale bread, 2 cupfuls milk, 2 teaspoonfuls cornstarch, 2 tablespoonfuls butter.
Dry the bread thoroughly in the oven, then toast over a clear fire to a golden brown. Heat the milk in the double boiler, add the butter, and when scalding hot, the cornstarch moistened in cold milk. It ought to be like a milk sauce. Lay the toast on a hot platter and baste each slice with the sauce. Serve very hot.
Brown-Bread Sauté.
Cut the crusts off around slices of Boston brown bread with a large STALE BREAD cooky cutter. Fry bacon in a spider and put it on a hot platter when crisp. Then lay the bread in the bacon fat, and sauté on both sides.
Serve a crisp curled slice of bacon on each brown round.
Tomato Toast. 1½ cupfuls strained tomato, cupful scalded milk, 1 teaspoonful soda, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 3 tablespoonfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 6 slices toast.
Make a tomato sauce from the butter, flour, and tomato, add the soda and salt, then the milk. Dip the toast in the sauce. Serve hot.
Bread Griddlecakes. 1½ cupfuls scalded milk, 1½ cupfuls stale bread crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 eggs, cupful flour, teaspoonful salt, Bread Sauce. cupful stale bread crumbs, 1½ cupfuls scalded milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, Pepper and salt, cupful browned crumbs.
Pour the hot milk over the stale crumbs and cook in a double boiler for twenty minutes. Add the butter, pepper, and salt. Put 1 tablespoonful butter in an omelet pan and in it brown cupful dry crumbs. Pour the sauce about game, timbales, or anything you wish to serve with it, and on top sprinkle browned hot crumbs.
Bread Croquettes. 2 cupfuls stale bread crumbs, 1 cupful hot milk, Grated rind 1 lemon, cupful currants, teaspoonful cinnamon, Yolks 2 eggs.
Boil the bread crumbs for two minutes in the hot milk. Add the lemon, currants, cinnamon, and remove from the fire. Beat in the croquettes, crumb, and fry in hot 31 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking yolks of the eggs. Cool, form into powder.
Pour the hot milk and the melted butter over the crumbs and soak until they are soft. Add the well-beaten eggs, flour, salt, and baking powder. Cook on a griddle like cakes. Bread Roulettes. 1 cupful stale bread crumbs, cupful milk, 1 egg, Dash salt.
Soak the bread crumbs in the milk.
Mix with the egg and seasonings.
Form into tiny balls, flour, egg, crumb, and fry in hot fat.
Beignets of Buns. 2 stale buns, 1 egg, + gill milk, 1½ tablespoonfuls flour, Dash salt.
Soak the buns five minutes in the milk. Mix the yolk of the egg with milk, add the flour, salt, and beaten white. Dip the buns into batter, fry in half lard and half butter, light brown on both sides. Dust with sugar, and serve with jelly or preserved fruit.
A run of thrift recipes built around bread that has gone dry, written for a coal or wood range with an open fire-box. Most translate directly to a skillet, broiler or saucepan; the chief difficulty is that many of the ingredient lists have lost their fractions and need judgement.
- Missing quantitiesSeveral lists read "cupful" or "teaspoonful" with no number in front — the fractions are absent from the printed text. Treat these as unmeasured and work from the method: in the bread sauce, roughly 1 cup of soft crumbs to 1½ cups milk gives the consistency described; in the buckwheat cakes, about 1 cup crumbs to 2 cups buckwheat flour. Do not guess at the cheese quantities in the brown-bread toast, where the same ingredient is listed twice.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed to stand over coals. Any heavy skillet serves. "A dry, hot spider over a rather slow fire" for the browned toast means a preheated pan over medium-low with no added fat, lid on.
- Clear, red fireToasting "over a clear, red fire" means glowing coals with no flame or smoke. The modern equivalent is a broiler at full heat with the rack four to five inches down, or a dry skillet. The two minutes given applies to the first side only; the second side is simply held until the moisture is drawn out, and will generally go faster.
- Toasted sandwichesHolding an assembled buttered sandwich in a wire toasting rack is exactly what a sandwich press does. In a skillet, weight the sandwich with a second pan and cook over medium until the butter inside melts, about three minutes a side.
- Cake yeastOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz, equivalent to roughly 2¼ teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. The overnight buckwheat sponge is a genuine leaven, not a shortcut; the teaspoon of soda in the morning neutralises the accumulated acidity as much as it lifts.
- GillThe printed "+ gill milk" has lost its fraction. A US gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup, so the beignets use at most that much milk between soaking the buns and thinning the batter. Split it — most into the soak, a spoonful or two into the batter.
- Soda in the tomato toastThe teaspoon of soda goes into the tomato sauce before the milk to stop the acid curdling the dairy. Add it off the heat, let the foaming subside, then stir the scalded milk in. A whole teaspoon is generous for 1½ cups of tomato and will taste soapy if the tomato is a mild modern purée; start with half.
- Egg yolk in the cream sauceThe yolk enriching the white sauce for leftover sandwiches must not boil. Take the thickened sauce off the heat, whisk a little into the beaten yolk, return it, and hold it below a simmer for a minute. Note also that these are cooked meat sandwiches being reheated in oven and hot sauce, which is what makes the leftovers acceptable.
- Brewis and yieldBrewis is a soft porridge of milk and bread, not a pudding. The instruction that it be "light, dry porridge" rather than pasty means adding the bread in handfuls and stopping while it still looks loose; it stiffens as it stands.
"Stale bread" as a chapter heading is a mark of the household-economy literature that flourished either side of 1900, when a loaf was baked or bought daily and nothing in the breadbox was allowed to reach the bin. Brewis is the oldest thing here: the word descends from Middle English brewis or browis, broth or bread sopped in broth, and survives in Newfoundland as fish and brewis made with hard bread. The passage on egged toast is a small piece of period commentary in its own right — the author's insistence that French, Spanish, German and Scotch toast are all "more properly egged toast" registers the confusion of names the dish already carried, and the recurrence of the spider, the toasting wires and the "clear, red fire" places the whole section in a kitchen still working over coals rather than a gas burner. There is also a reference to Calumet baking powder, a Chicago brand founded in 1889.