Bread Sticks
1 cup scalded milk 1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 cup butter 1 teaspoon salt yeast cake 1 cup lukewarm water 1 egg white 3 to 4 cups flour Mix butter, sugar, salt and milk. When dissolved, add yeast cake, white of egg well beaten, and enough flour to knead. Let rise to double its bulk, knead, shape, let rise again, and bake in hot oven. 2 cups milk yeast cake 4 cup lukewarm water 4 eggs 4 cup butter
A plain yeast dough enriched with butter and egg white, rolled thin and baked hard. The text as printed has suffered in transcription — fractions have dropped out and a second, unrelated ingredient list has run on at the end — so read it with that in mind.
- The garbled textThe missing quantity before "yeast cake" may have been a whole cake or a fraction of one; the printed text does not say. "4 cup butter" is presumably 1/4 cup. The final run of ingredients (2 cups milk, 4 eggs, and so on) appears to belong to a separate recipe and has no part in the bread sticks.
- Yeast cakeCompressed fresh yeast cakes of the period varied in size; the small cake still sold is about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. With 3 to 4 cups of flour, one cake is a plausible reading.
- Scalded milkScalding is generally held to destroy a component of raw milk that slackens gluten. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding — warm it enough to melt the butter and no more, then let the mixture cool to about 105F before the yeast goes in; much hotter than that and the yeast will be killed.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a hot oven is conventionally taken as about 425 to 450F. Bread sticks want high heat and a short bake so they crisp through before the interior can stay soft; figure roughly 12 to 18 minutes depending on thickness.
- Egg white onlyThe white sets firm without the fat and colour of the yolk, giving a drier, crisper stick. Save the yolk for a wash if you want gloss.
- Flour quantityOne cup of milk plus one cup of water against only 3 to 4 cups of flour is a very high proportion of liquid; the recipe's own direction is "enough flour to knead," and more than the stated range will likely be needed. Add only until the dough clears the bowl; overflouring makes the sticks tough rather than brittle.
- ShapingThe recipe says only "shape"; for sticks this presumably means thin ropes, perhaps 8 inches long. Thicker ropes bake into small rolls rather than sticks. A short second rise, 20 to 30 minutes, keeps them from puffing and losing their snap.
- YieldAbout 30 to 36 sticks. They keep crisp several days in a tin and can be re-crisped in a 300F oven for five minutes.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard, was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and in the manner often associated with trade cookbooks of its day it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a complete general household course — bread, soups, meats, and the rest — so the book could earn a place on the kitchen shelf rather than in a drawer. Thin crisp bread sticks reached American cookbooks largely through Italian grissini, traditionally traced to seventeenth-century Turin, but by 1900 they had been absorbed into the standard American bread chapter as a use for ordinary enriched dough and were served with soup at hotel and dinner tables. The compressed yeast cake called for here was itself a relatively recent convenience: commercial fresh yeast is generally said to have displaced homemade hop and potato ferments in many city kitchens around the end of the century, which is why a book of this date can call for a cake without further explanation.