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To Serve with Soup
Cut bread into half-inch slices; remove the crusts and cut into cubes; put in shallow pans and brown in the oven. Buttering the bread will improve the flavor and insure quick browning. Pulled Bread
This is a croutons recipe under an older heading, with the words "Pulled Bread" left dangling at the end as the catchline for the entry that followed it in the original loose-leaf pages. Nothing here is difficult, but the oven temperature and the choice of bread decide whether you get crisp cubes or dry, leathery ones.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know the setting; use 350-375F. Plain unbuttered cubes take 10-15 minutes, buttered ones closer to 8-12. Stir once or twice so the cut faces color evenly.
- The bread matters mostUse a firm white loaf that is a day or two old. Fresh, soft sandwich bread compresses under the knife and steams rather than crisps, and a modern enriched loaf will tend to brown faster than a plainer one.
- ButteringButter the slices before cutting, not the cubes after; it is faster and more even. Melted butter tossed through the cubes works too, and about 2 tablespoons is enough for four slices.
- "Shallow pans"A rimmed baking sheet. The point is a single uncrowded layer, so the moisture escapes instead of collecting under the bread.
- YieldFour half-inch slices give roughly two cups of cubes, which serves four to six as a soup garnish.
- StorageCool completely before putting them away or trapped steam will soften them. Unbuttered croutons keep a week in a tin; buttered ones go stale-tasting within two or three days and are better made the same day.
- Pulled breadThe stray phrase at the end refers to a separate preparation: the soft crumb torn from a fresh loaf in ragged pieces and baked dry, so it browns in irregular crags rather than neat cubes. It is not an instruction belonging to this recipe.
Fried or baked bread cubes had been going into soup for centuries before this book. The instruction to brown them in the oven rather than fry them in fat reflects the practical shape of a turn-of-the-century range: the oven was already hot, and a shallow pan of bread needed no watching. A heading for the next item, "Pulled Bread," survives at the bottom of this one — a catchline of the sort printers used to link one page to the next.