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Prepared Bread Crumbs
Break stale bread into small pieces; place these with whatever When crumbs you have upon a tin plate in a moderate oven. brown and crisp, roll them fine or run them through a meat chopper and put them away until needed in a covered glass jar. Cracker crumbs may be prepared in the same way.
A standing pantry preparation rather than a dish: dried, toasted crumbs for coating croquettes, cutlets and stuffed birds. The whole point is to drive off all moisture so the crumbs keep.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F. The bread should dry through and take on colour slowly; at 400F the outsides brown before the centres of the pieces are dry, and those damp centres are what later turn a jar of crumbs musty.
- The hinge: dry, not merely brownedCrumbs that snap cleanly and feel weightless are done. Any flex or chew means retained water, and stored crumbs with moisture in them are liable to go musty or mould.
- Tin plateAny rimmed sheet pan works. Spread the bread in a single layer and stir it once or twice so the pieces at the pan edges do not scorch.
- TimingDepending on how stale the bread is and how large the pieces, reckon 20-40 minutes. Let the pieces cool completely before grinding and before they go into the jar.
- Meat chopperThe hand-cranked grinder of the period. A food processor does this in seconds, or a rolling pin and a heavy bag if you want a coarser crumb for frying.
- StorageA covered glass jar at room temperature is fine for thoroughly dried crumbs, which will keep a month or more. Freezing extends that further and is worth doing if your kitchen is humid.
- Cracker crumbsModern saltines will work but bring salt and fat with them, so season the dish accordingly.
Nothing in a working kitchen of this era was thrown out, and stale bread had a fixed career: first toast, then crumbs, then the crumb jar. Books of this kind lean heavily on this sort of standing preparation, the small stock item made in quantity on a baking day and drawn on for weeks. Dried crumbs mattered especially in the poultry and game chapters, where they bound stuffings, coated croquettes made from the previous day's bird, and gilded the tops of scalloped dishes.