Home › Bread And Bread Making › Sticks
Sticks
1 cup scalded milk. 1/4 cup butter. 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water White 1 egg 3¾ cups flour Add butter, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake, white of egg well beaten, and flour. Knead, let rise, shape, let rise again, and start baking in a hot oven, reducing heat, that sticks may be crisp and dry. To shape sticks, first shape as small biscuits, roll on board (where there is no flour) with hands until eight inches in length, keeping of uniform size and rounded ends, which may be done by bringing fingers close to, but not over, ends of sticks.
The ingredient list as printed here has been mangled in transcription: the milk, butter, sugar and salt named in the method never appear with quantities. Read this as a technique lesson in shaping bread sticks rather than a complete formula, and borrow proportions from a lean white bread dough.
- The missing amountsThe water and flour quantities were checked against the printed page and read as they now stand, a quarter cup and 3¾ cups. The milk, butter, sugar and salt called for in the method are absent from this printing; for that much flour a lean white bread dough would take roughly 1 cup milk, a tablespoon or two of butter, a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size, commonly around 3/5 oz for the small household cake. One packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast stands in, dissolved in the quarter cup of warm water.
- The oven"A hot oven" of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Start there to set the sticks and give them color, then drop the heat (say 325-350F) so they dry through to the center without darkening further. The recipe gives no time; judge by color and feel.
- Crisp and dry is the pointThese are meant to snap, not to be soft rolls. Underbaking leaves a bready core that goes leathery as it cools; leave them in until they sound hollow and feel light for their size.
- Rolling on a bare boardThe instruction to roll "where there is no flour" is the hinge of the whole recipe. A dusted board lets the dough slide instead of gripping, and the stick will not elongate evenly. Work on clean, dry wood or a bare counter.
- Egg whiteBeaten white alone lightens the crumb without the richness of yolk, which would soften the crust. Keep the yolk for something else rather than adding it here.
- Second riseThe recipe gives no time; a short proof of roughly 20-30 minutes suits shaped sticks. Overproofed sticks slump and lose the uniform shape the shaping directions work to achieve.
- YieldProbably in the region of eighteen to twenty-four sticks eight inches long, depending on how small the initial "biscuits" are divided.
Bread sticks earned their own heading in American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s as part of a broader fashion for dry, crisp breads at the dinner table: zwieback, pulled bread and Farmer's own "Cases for Bread" all appear in the same neighborhood of the book. The appeal was partly dietary: crisp, thoroughly baked breads were widely recommended as easier to digest than soft new bread, a belief that ran through nineteenth-century domestic advice and gave dry breads a mild air of virtue. The shaping directions are detailed, and they reflect a period in which uniform, hand-rolled sticks were the mark of the form. The technique itself — rolling under flat palms on an unfloured surface, fingers drawn in at the ends — resembles the one used for Italian grissini.