The American Pastry Cook

Jessup Whitehead's American Pastry Cook — the hotel pastry trade's own manual, in hundreds of numbered recipes.

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For Breakfast, Lunch and Tea

Perhaps you want to know what sort of a breakfast one gets at Young's. I wish this was an essay on housekeeping, so that every point could be enlarged upon. But the same wonder comes up at every notable restaurant, why people can't have just as good eating at home every day and why they never by any possibility do so. Why the diningroom cannot be as cool, as orderly and spotless, the melon as crisp, the salad as fresh and piquant, the cutlet as brown without, as melting and juicy within, or the bread and butter as perfect as that at Young's, will always be remarkable to any one condemned to domestic interiors.--Boston Letter in N. Y. World.

Dust unto dust; what must be must.

If you can't get crumbs, you had best eat crust. --Old Song. She would talk of the last tragedy with the emphatic tone of a connois eur, in the same breath that she would ask, with Maria Antoinette, why the poor people were so clamorous for bread when they might buy such nice brioche for two-pence apiece--Bulwer-Pelham.

The above allusion to brioche appears in nearly the same words also in one of Dumas' prefaces--"Louise de la Valliere"--I think, but the solecism circulates with the point upon other articles of diet as well; as in one place the surprise is that poor peasants should prefer potatoes to meat, and only last month, in a magazine, it was a "French princess," and "chicken broth" So far as living on the best of bread goes, there need be no reason why people condemned to domestic interiors should have to suffer from the comparison with those in hotels and restaurants, for after the details of the simple art of making it, set forth in these columns, there is only needed diligence and a proper degree of pride in the resulting product.

The English are corrupting our language dreadfully. They call our crackers biscuits; our biscuits they call Scotch scones; our muffins, if they have them seem not to be called muffins, for that name is given to a poorer sort that is baked on a kind of griddle, and in like manner they call our rusk buns, while fresh and hot, and only accept them as dusks when sliced and dried brown in the oven.

Brioches and French rusks, the half dozen varieties of hot breads which seem to be popularly associated with those names in the United States, are unsurpassed for the afternoon teas which are becoming fashionable, and for lunch, and for French breakfasts of bread and coffee. We find "brioche, with cheese," and with fruit, also forming parts of a course in some "royal" dinner menus.

At the great meat, fowl, fish and potato suppers and breakfasts of American hotels, these kinds seem to find no proper place. They are well worth practicing, however, for more domestic occasions, and have always been considered the highest test of skill in bread-making.

← Albany Rolls. Vienna Rolls. Delavan RollsBrioche, or Butter Rusks →