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Roll Croustades
Bake bread dough in muffin pans, when cold cut off tops, remove soft portion leaving shell. Butter inside and out, and brown in the oven. Fill with any creamed mixture.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already have bread dough rising on the back of the stove. The whole thing hinges on baking the rolls firm enough to hollow out without collapsing.
- CroustadeFrom the French for a crust used as an edible container. Here it means a hollowed roll rather than the fried bread or pastry cases the word usually implies in older menus.
- Bread doughAny lean white yeast dough works; a straightforward sandwich loaf recipe is ideal. Enriched brioche-style dough browns too fast and tears when you scoop it. Fill each muffin cup about two-thirds and let the dough rise to the rim before baking.
- Baking the rollsThe recipe gives no temperature or time; in modern terms a moderate oven (roughly 350-375F) for something like 18-22 minutes, until the crust is set, will do. Underbaked rolls will not hold a shell. Bake these the day before if convenient — a day-old roll hollows more cleanly than a fresh one.
- "When cold"Not a stylistic flourish. Warm bread compresses and shreds under a knife; fully cooled crumb pulls away in one piece. Cut the top off, then work a small knife around the inside wall and lift the center out, leaving about a quarter inch of wall and base.
- BrowningButter inside and out and set them on a sheet in a hot oven (around 400F) until crisp and deep gold, a matter of minutes. The buttering and second bake help keep a creamed filling from soaking straight through.
- Fillings"Any creamed mixture" means a thick white-sauce base — creamed chicken, sweetbreads, oysters, mushrooms, lobster. Make the sauce stiffer than you would serve on toast, roughly two tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk, or it will run out of the shell.
- TimingFill at the last moment and serve at once. A filled croustade holds perhaps five minutes before the base softens.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many rolls to make; a modern twelve-cup muffin pan would give twelve croustades. Allowing two apiece, that suits half a dozen for an entree course in the older sense — a small dish between fish and roast — or fewer as a light main.
Lowney's treats "entree" in the French service sense: a made dish of something already cooked, sauced and presented in a container, served between the heavier courses. The container mattered a good deal, and cookbooks of the period offer a range of edible vessels — patty shells, timbale cases, fried bread croustades, scooped-out rolls — for turning cooked chicken, oysters or sweetbreads into something that looked composed. This version is the thriftiest of the family: it needs no puff pastry, no deep fat and no special mold, only bread dough and a muffin pan. A recipe of this kind suggests a kitchen where bread was likely baked at home, so that a few small rolls could be diverted from the batch.