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Bread Cutlets
Cut some neat slices of brown or white bread half an inch thick. Remove crust, and cut into large fingers; soak them in a mixture composed of milk, a little flour and sweet herbs and seasoning, and fry crisp, either in butter or oil.
A frugal wartime-era standby: bread fingers soaked in seasoned milk batter and fried until crisp. The whole dish hinges on how long the bread sits in the liquid.
- The soak is seconds, not minutesDon't over-soak -- Half-inch bread saturates fast, and the recipe's "soak" is best read as a short dip rather than a long steep: wet both sides so the outside is coated and the centre still has structure. Bread left to sit tends to collapse in the pan and absorb fat instead of browning.
- What the batter actually isThe batter -- The original specifies only milk, a little flour, sweet herbs and seasoning, with no quantities. A workable reading is a thin savoury batter: about 1 cup milk whisked with 2 tablespoons flour, salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of chopped thyme, sage, parsley or marjoram. It should coat a spoon lightly, not cling.
- "Sweet herbs"Period shorthand for the mild culinary herbs, as opposed to bitter or medicinal ones. Dried mixed herbs at about a third the quantity of fresh will do.
- Stale bread is the right breadBread choice -- The recipe specifies only brown or white bread, crusts removed. In practice day-old loaf holds a soak better than fresh, and a close-crumbed white or wholemeal sandwich loaf behaves better than an open, airy crumb.
- Fat and heatUse enough butter or oil to come a few millimetres up the pan over medium-high heat. Butter alone browns quickly at this temperature, so half butter and half neutral oil gives colour without scorching.
- Adding an eggThe original omits egg, presumably for economy. One beaten egg in the milk gives a firmer, more cutlet-like set and browns better, if you are not keeping the dish egg-free.
- Yield and servingFour slices of bread give roughly 12 fingers, enough for two as a main with gravy or tomato sauce, or four as a side. Serve straight from the pan; they soften within minutes.
Bread cutlets belong to the family of "mock" dishes that filled meatless cookbooks, long a staple of vegetarian and economical cookery. The word cutlet is doing rhetorical work here: it signals a shaped, fried, main-course portion sitting where a chop would sit on the plate, and books of this kind applied it freely to lentils, nuts, rice and, as here, plain bread. Behind the invention lies a much older habit of never wasting bread, the same impulse that produced bread sauce, panada and pain perdu; the herbs and seasoning simply turn the sweet version savoury. The reliance on milk, flour and a little fat also shows what was cheap and available in the home kitchen, and why so many meat substitutes of this sort read as starch fried in something rich.