Bread
When Dr. Lister, the physician of Queen Anne, went to Paris in the beginning of last century, he declared that the French bread made in London was better than that made in Paris. It is the same now.
English bread itself is not good. Even baker's bread is poor stuff; and home-made bread realizes pretty well the image of a son asking his father for bread and receiving a stone. Nevertheless, observe two things: the best bread for cooking purposes is known in the French kitchen as pain Anglais-it is the English pan loaf; and the best bread in the world is made in London-but it is made by French bakers from Hungarian flour. The chemists tell us that this bread is not so nourishing as the coarser kinds; but what is the worth of their analysis we have already seen at page 15. We may take the navvy as a good practical judge. He knows what suits him best, and he will always be found eating the finest bread he can get.
The English bread, as a rule, is so bad that at our dinnertables it has been displaced by the potato. The Englishman wants a potato with every dish that comes before him -he cannot do without it, no matter what other vegetables are provided. The Frenchman, on the other hand, eats bread throughout dinner; and many have been heard to complain that at an English dinner they are quite ashamed of the number of times they have to ask for bread-they can never get enough. The bread or potato thus eaten throughout a meal serves two ends: it supplies the farinaceous element of food, and it acts upon the palate as a sponge to prepare it for a new experience. Which for the latter purpose is the more serviceable-the French or the English style-the bread or the potato? Suppose one were tasting wines: will the English wine-taster ever come to eating potatoes between his sips of the different vintages? He eats bread, which is the best thing possible for the renovation of his taste. Here is a marked point in which the French are ahead of the English in understanding the Bread laws of gustation. They leave the potato to Englishmen; they choose bread for themselves, and they take care to have their bread of the best.
Bread and Butter with Fruit-a favourite sweet entremet described under the name of Charlotte.
Breadcrumbs, Raspings, Crusts-much used in cookery, but scarcely needing explanation. The bread for crumbs should be stale and well sifted. A more common kind is made by baking any pieces of bread until hard, braying them in a mortar, and passing them through a sieve.
Bread Pudding. - When one is in the humour to eat breadpudding one wants it very simple-therefore the simplest receipt is the best, and the less we say of currants and candied citron the better. The rule is to pour upon fine breadcrumbs about three times the quantity of liquid-in the form of rich milk and butter. Say there are six ounces of bread, on this put two ounces of fresh butter, and then pour boiling hot a pint (sixteen ounces) of the creamiest milk to be obtained. Cover this over, and let it stand until the bread is well soaked-which will take about half an hour. Then mix in three ounces of sugar, the yolks of five eggs, the whites of three, and a little nutmeg. Pour it into a dish, and bake it for half an hour.
Bread Sauce. This is a serious matter, and is rarely turned out well. Many cooks think it enough to serve up mere milk-sop, and there are very few of the receipts which allow for it more than ten minutes' preparation. The sauce is very simple, but it is worth some care. The following receipt is borrowed from Miss Acton : "Put into a saucepan nearly half a pint of fine breadcrumbs, the white part of a large but mild onion cut into quarters, three-quarters of a pint of new milk; and boil them very gently, keeping them often stirred until the onion is perfectly tender, which will be in from forty minutes to an hour. Press the whole Brill through a hair sieve; reduce the sauce by quick boiling should it be too thin; add salt, nutmeg, an ounce of butter, and four spoonfuls of cream: and when it is of proper thickness, dish and send it quickly to table." Let it be added, however, that if the onion is chopped instead of being cut into quarters, the sauce will take much less time.
The entry opens as an essay but ends with two working recipes: a bread pudding and Eliza Acton's bread sauce. Both are sound, and both depend on a long soak rather than fast cooking.
- The hinge: soak, don't stirThe hinge: a long soak, not fast cooking -- In both dishes the bread must be allowed to swell in hot liquid until it collapses of its own accord. Rushing the pudding's half-hour soak, or the sauce's forty to sixty minutes of gentle simmering (which Acton directs be kept often stirred), gives you wet bread suspended in milk rather than a single smooth body.
- Pints and ouncesThis is a British book, in which a pint is normally the imperial 20 fl oz, yet Kettner glosses his own pint as "sixteen ounces"; whether he means weight or a 16-oz measure is not clear from the text. Either way, read the pudding as roughly 6 oz bread, 2 oz butter and about 2 cups of milk. Acton's "nearly half a pint" of crumbs is somewhere between one and one and a quarter cups, loosely packed; her three-quarters of a pint of milk is about 1 3/4 cups.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given for the pudding. Bake it at 325-350F for the stated half hour, in a dish set in a water bath if you want it silky; it is a custard and will curdle if driven hard.
- EggsFive yolks and three whites in a pint of milk makes a rich, sliceable custard rather than a loose one. The leftover two whites keep for a few days refrigerated.
- BreadcrumbsStale crumb from a plain white loaf, sieved, is what is meant. The "raspings" described here are the harder sort, baked dry and pounded, closer to modern dried breadcrumbs, and they are wrong for both of these dishes. Commercial panko or seasoned crumbs will not soak down properly.
- The onion in the sauceActon's quartered onion is there to flavour and then be sieved out, which is why the sauce needs an hour. Kettner's closing note is the practical one: chop the onion finely and the cooking time drops sharply, though it will need more diligent stirring to keep the milk from catching.
- Spoonfuls of cream"Four spoonfuls" here most likely means tablespoons, so roughly 1/4 cup. Add it at the end, off a hard boil, along with the butter.
- YieldThe pudding serves four to six. The bread sauce makes enough for a roast chicken or a small turkey; it is traditionally served with roast poultry and game birds.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written not by the restaurateur Auguste Kettner but, it is generally accepted, by the journalist E. S. Dallas, which accounts for the argumentative essay-writing that surrounds the actual cookery here. The Dr Lister invoked at the start is Martin Lister, physician to Queen Anne, whose Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 did indeed praise London's French bakers. The bread sauce recipe is lifted, with acknowledgement, from Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845); bread thickened with milk and onion is far older, descending from the medieval English practice of using bread rather than flour or roux as the body of a sauce, and it survives on British tables at Christmas. The digression on bread versus potato is worth reading as period evidence of the resentment a writer could still feel towards the potato at the English dinner table.