Croutons
Cut stale bread into slices about one-third of an inch thick, and remove all crust. Spread with butter, cut in cubes and bake in the oven until delicately browned. If preferred, these cubes of bread may be fried in deep fat or sauted in just enough fat to keep them from burning. Put in soup at time of serving, or pass in a separate dish, permitting each person to put as many croutons as he may wish in his portion of soup.
A plain formula for soup croutons that still works exactly as written. The only thing the original leaves out is a temperature, and the one rule worth keeping is that croutons go into the bowl at the last second.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. Use 350F and turn the cubes once, or 400F if you want a crisper shell and a slightly chewy centre. At 350F, buttered cubes take roughly 12-18 minutes depending on how dry the bread was to start.
- Butter the slice, not the cubesSpreading before cutting leaves butter on one face only, which may be why the sequence runs this way. Tossing cut cubes in melted butter gives a heavier, more uniformly greasy result.
- Stale breadThis means genuinely dry day-old bread, not the soft sliced loaf. A firm white or country loaf works; very open sourdough gives ragged cubes, and enriched sandwich bread browns fast because of its sugar.
- Deep fatFor the fried version hold the fat at 350-365F and work in small batches. Croutons colour in under a minute and go from golden to bitter quickly, so lift them a shade lighter than you want.
- Sauteing"Just enough fat to keep them from burning" is about a tablespoon per two cups of cubes in a wide pan. Keep them moving; a crowded pan gives soft, oily croutons.
- Timing at the tableCroutons begin to soften as soon as they meet hot liquid, which is why the recipe adds them only at serving. Of the two methods it offers, passing them separately keeps them crisp longest.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; four slices will produce something in the region of two cups of cubes. Cooled completely, oven-baked croutons keep for several days in a tin; fried ones go stale-tasting faster and are best the same day.
Crouton is simply the French croûton, a diminutive of croûte, crust, and the word entered English cookery writing in the nineteenth century along with a good deal of other French kitchen vocabulary. The dish itself is far older than the name: bread was the standard thickener and garnish for soup across medieval and early modern Europe, and cutting stale loaf into neat cubes to crisp in fat is the thrifty end of that tradition. Its place in the soup chapter of a magazine cookbook like this one is telling. The Delineator was a Butterick pattern magazine aimed at middle-class housekeepers, and a recipe that turns yesterday's bread into a garnish smart enough to pass in a separate dish is exactly the kind of small economy such books were built to teach.