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Brewis
Break stale bits or slices of brown and white bread in small pieces, allowing one and one-half cups brown bread to one-half cup white bread. Butter a hot frying-pan, put in bread, and cover with equal parts milk and water. Cook until soft; add butter and salt to taste.
A stale-bread supper dish that depends on the brown bread being the steamed New England kind, not a modern whole-wheat sandwich loaf. The proportions are by volume of broken bread, so measure loosely.
- The brown breadFarmer means Boston brown bread — a steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and graham flour sweetened with molasses. Substituting a wheat sandwich bread gives a bland, pasty result; a dense pumpernickel or rye is a closer stand-in than anything labelled "brown" today.
- Quantity of liquidNone is specified. Add the milk-and-water mixture just to cover the bread, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups for the 2 cups of bread here, and add more by the spoonful if it stiffens before the bread has collapsed.
- Cook until softAbout 5 to 8 minutes over low heat. Stir now and then; the molasses in brown bread scorches readily on a dry spot of the pan.
- Butter a hot frying-panThe pan is buttered mainly to keep the mixture from sticking, not to fry the bread. The recipe calls for the pan to be hot when the bread goes in, but drop the heat low once the liquid is added — this is a soaked dish, not a toast.
- ConsistencyThe finished dish should be thick and spoonable, like a savory bread pudding loosened with milk. If it goes soupy, keep it uncovered over low heat to drive off liquid.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; the 2 cups of bread would make about two portions as a breakfast or supper dish. It takes well to a grind of pepper, which the original omits.
"Brewis" is one of the oldest words in English cookery, descending from Middle English browis or browes, meaning broth or the bread soaked in it — generally taken as the same root that gives us "brose" in Scotland. For centuries it meant slices of bread steeped in the liquor from boiled meat, a way of making a small amount of fat and broth feed a table. By the time it reached Fannie Farmer's book at the end of the nineteenth century it had shed the broth entirely and become a New England thrift dish built on milk, water and the ends of a brown bread loaf. A related version survives in Newfoundland as fish and brewis, where hard bread is soaked overnight and served with salt cod, preserving the older sense of the word.