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Bread-Raspings
All pieces of bread should be put aside in a clean bowl, and when enough has been saved to fill a good-sized baking-tin, they should be baked in a slow oven until they are a rich golden color all through. They should then be rolled on a pastry-board — a small quantity at a time — until they are fine enough for use, and then put into a biscuit-box with a well-fitting lid, which should be kept in a dry place. These raspings are used in many recipes, and a good supply should always be kept on hand. They are not only better and more easily digested than ordinary bread-crumbs, but they are much more economical, and are the means of every scrap of bread being utilized. As the rolling would scratch and dent the board and rolling-pin used for pastry,— and it is necessary to keep them perfectly smooth — a special rolling-pin and board should be kept for this purpose.
This is a technique for turning bread ends into dried crumbs, and the whole thing hinges on drying them all the way through rather than toasting the outsides.
- "Slow oven"Read this as 300F, or lower — 250-275F works well and gives more margin. The crumbs should dry as much as they colour; a hotter oven browns the surface while the centre stays soft, and soft centres are what spoil in storage.
- How longExpect 30-60 minutes for scattered crusts and slices, turning once or twice. Break a piece open: it should snap dry with no leathery interior, and a cooled piece should be brittle rather than bendable.
- Raspings vs. crumbs"Raspings" are dried, twice-baked crumbs, distinct from the soft fresh crumbs of a modern recipe. They are not interchangeable — raspings coat and gratinate, soft crumbs bind stuffings and meatloaf and absorb liquid.
- The rolling pinA food processor or blender does this in seconds and spares the pastry board entirely. If you want the varied texture of the rolled version, crush the pieces in a heavy zip bag with a pin, then sieve out the coarse bits and re-crush them.
- StorageThe "dry place" instruction is doing real work. Cool the raspings completely before they go into a tin — sealing warm crumbs traps steam and they will mould. Fully dried, they keep for months in a tin; the freezer is a better bet in a humid kitchen.
- Bread to useThe recipe says only "all pieces of bread," and plain household loaves are the likely assumption. Enriched or sweet breads and anything heavily seeded will colour and turn bitter well before the crumb dries out.
- YieldVaries a good deal with the size of the tin and how densely the pieces are packed; a tin of saved bread ends will reduce to several cups of fine raspings.
- Where they goUse for gratin tops, crumbing cutlets and croquettes, lining buttered pudding moulds, and thickening a stuffing that has gone too wet.
Raspings take their name from the older practice of rasping — literally filing — the hard scorched crust off a baked loaf with a coarse grater or bread rasp, a step bakers used when loaves came out of a brick oven unevenly burnt. By the nineteenth century the word had come to mean bread dried hard and reduced to crumb, and English cookery books commonly distinguish raspings from breadcrumbs. The household economy argument — that not a scrap of bread is wasted — is made explicitly in the recipe itself. The claim that raspings are "more easily digested" than soft crumb reflects the era's confidence that browning and drying starch made it gentler on the stomach, an idea also behind the popularity of rusks, zwieback and dry toast for invalids.