Golden Bread
Choose bread which is elastic, but has no holes in it. Remove the crust and cut it in slices about one inch thick, and from these slices cut little pieces about three inches long and about one inch wide. Trim them off well, so they will not be ragged or uneven. Put these pieces into a bowl and throw on them some boiling water, then remove them immediately and throw them into a big bowl of cold water. This operation should be done quickly, so as to make the bread feel the impression of heat and cold, one directly after the other. Then take the bread between the hands and gently squeeze out the water without breaking the pieces or deforming them. Place them on a napkin to dry. Then dip them in egg which has been beaten up and seasoned with salt and pepper. Allow the egg to soak well into the bread. Fifteen minutes before serving put a frying-pan on with a quantity of lard, and as soon as the lard is lukewarm put in the pieces of bread, turn them as soon as they harden a little on one side. The bread must fry very slowly, and should remain on the fire at least ten minutes, so that the heat can penetrate gradually into the middle and make it light. This bread to be successful should be hollow inside like a fritter when finished. When the bread has taken a good golden color, remove from the lard, drain it on a napkin, add a little salt, and serve very hot.
This is fried bread engineered to puff hollow, and almost everything depends on the water shock and a genuinely slow fry. Read the two temperature notes before starting.
- The hinge: boiling water, then cold, fastThe double dip most likely swells the outside of the crumb while leaving the centre dense, so that in the pan the trapped moisture turns to steam and inflates the piece. Seconds in the boiling water, not a soak -- the recipe says remove them immediately -- then straight into a large bowl of cold water.
- The bread"Elastic, but has no holes in it" means a close, chewy white crumb — a plain sandwich loaf or a firm pain de mie. Open-structured ciabatta or sourdough will fall apart in the water and never puff. Day-old bread holds its shape better than fresh.
- Lukewarm fat, and whyStarting the pieces in barely warm fat is deliberate, not carelessness. If the exterior crusts immediately the steam cannot expand and the centre stays sodden. The recipe gives no temperatures; as a modern guide, let the fat sit low, roughly 275-300F, for most of the ten minutes and only climb toward 340-350F at the end to colour.
- How much fat"A quantity of lard" is not specified; shallow frying, roughly half an inch in the pan, is enough to turn the pieces in. Lard is what the recipe calls for; a neutral oil can be substituted.
- Egg soakBeat the egg well and season it with salt and pepper as directed; allow enough egg that the pieces can genuinely absorb it rather than merely be coated, and give them time to sit in it, as the instruction to "allow the egg to soak well" requires.
- NapkinsWhere the original says napkin, use a clean tea towel for drying the squeezed pieces and paper towel for draining after frying.
- Yield and servingServe very hot and salted, as the recipe directs. It is not a sweet dish: there is no sugar in it, and it is seasoned with salt and pepper.
Pane dorato — gilded bread — belongs to the long Italian family of dishes built on bread and an egg, the same thrifty logic that produces mozzarella in carrozza and, in a sweeter register, French toast. The trick of shocking the crumb in boiling and then cold water so it inflates in the fat is the kind of detail that marks a domestic tradition rather than a restaurant one: it costs nothing but attention, and it turns a scrap of loaf into something that eats like a fritter. Simple Italian Cookery was published in 1912 under the name Antonia Isola, a pen name for the American writer Mabel Earl McGinnis, and it is often counted among the earlier books to put plain Italian home dishes in front of English-speaking cooks.