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Salad Sticks
Follow recipe for Sticks. Let rise, and add salt to dough, allowing two teaspoons to each cup of dough.
Shape in small sticks, let rise again, sprinkle with salt, and bake in a slow oven. If preferred glazed, brush over with egg yolk slightly beaten and diluted with one-half tablespoon cold water.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have already turned to the plain "Sticks" formula earlier in the bread chapter and are simply salting it. A few of its instructions read strangely on their own.
- It is not self-containedYou need the base "Sticks" dough from earlier in the book; this page only tells you how to salt, shape and finish it.
- The salt figureTwo teaspoons of salt to a cup of dough is roughly 4 to 5 percent of the dough's weight, well above the 1.5 to 2 percent bread usually carries, and enough to check the yeast and taste harsh. Whether this is a misprint or reflects a looser sense of "a cup of dough" cannot be settled from the text. Salting at the usual rate and keeping the rest for the sprinkle is the safer reading.
- A slow ovenConventionally understood as somewhere in the 250 to 325°F range; the recipe itself gives no figure. The low heat suits sticks meant to dry through to a crisp rather than brown, so bake until they snap rather than to a fixed time.
- The glazeOne yolk slightly beaten with half a tablespoon of cold water brushes on thin and gives gloss. The recipe offers it as an option and does not say how it is meant to sit with the salt sprinkle.
- Second riseThe recipe gives no time. Keep it short; over-proofed sticks tend to slacken in a slow oven.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe states no yield or size beyond "small sticks". Fully dried, they will keep in a tin; any softness means they need longer drying.
Thin salted bread sticks belong to the same table logic as the crackers, wafers and toasted rounds that fill this part of the book: the American formal dinner of the 1890s ran to many courses, and each wanted its own dry accompaniment. Salad sticks went out with the salad course, where a crisp, savory bread was thought to suit oil and vinegar better than a soft roll. The form is often said to descend from the Italian grissini, associated with Turin, though how it entered English and American cookery is not documented, and the Boston Cooking School gives no such attribution and simply files them among the shaped breads. The egg-yolk glaze is a small technical refinement, offered as an option, with the exact dilution specified.