Majo
Place a loaf of baker's bread in a baking pan and cover it with a tin plate. Let it remain in a moderate oven about twenty minutes, or until heated through; then with a fork remove the crust and tear the soft part into large ragged pieces. Spread these pieces in a pan and place them in a hot oven until crisp and brown.
This is the bread frequently recommended for dyspeptics, but is delicious served in the place of crackers.
Imperial Sticks Cut stale bread into one-third-inch slices and remove the crusts. Spread both sides thinly with butter; cut into narrow strips and brown in a quick oven.. Serve with soup in place of croutons or crackers. • •
Two soup accompaniments in one entry: pulled bread, torn from a warmed loaf and crisped, and buttered bread sticks. Neither needs measuring, but both depend entirely on oven heat and on the bread you start with.
- The hinge: warm the loaf firstThe twenty minutes under cover is what makes the crumb pull apart in ragged, open pieces rather than crumbling or compressing. Skip it and you get croutons, not pulled bread.
- Oven temperaturesIn modern terms a moderate oven for the initial warming is around 350F; the hot oven for crisping and the quick oven for the Imperial Sticks both fall in the 400-450F band (period cookbooks used 'hot' and 'quick' more or less interchangeably). Watch the sticks closely; buttered bread colours fast.
- The tin plateAn inverted metal pie plate or a sheet of foil crimped over the pan does the same job. The point is to trap steam so the crumb softens through instead of drying.
- "Baker's bread"In period usage this meant a bought loaf as opposed to home-baked: a plain white pan or hearth loaf with a crumb loose enough to tear. The recipe gives no age for it. A dense sourdough or a very soft modern sandwich loaf is unlikely to shred into the intended ragged shapes.
- Stale bread for the sticksBread that is stale but not bone-dry cuts to a clean third-inch slice and takes butter without tearing. Fresh bread will drag under the knife; leave slices uncovered for an hour or two first.
- DyspepticsPulled bread was prescribed as an invalid food because thorough drying was thought to make starch easier to digest. Treat this as period medical thinking, not a claim to rely on.
- Yield and keepingA large loaf gives enough pulled bread to go round a table at a soup course. Both keep a few days in a tin and can be re-crisped briefly in a moderate oven if they soften.
Pulled bread belongs to a family of twice-baked breads, alongside zwieback and rusks, all built on the same idea that a slow second drying makes bread lighter on the stomach and longer-keeping. The habit of dressing up such economies with a grand name is typical of the period, and "Imperial Sticks" is nothing more than buttered toast fingers given a title fit for a printed menu.