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Buttered Crums
Melt one to three tablespoons of butter, but do not brown it. Add one cup bread-crums, and mix with a fork until all the crums are covered.
A working component rather than a dish: buttered crumbs go on gratins, scalloped vegetables, macaroni and baked fish. The proportions here are deliberately loose, and the low end of the butter range gives a drier, crisper topping.
- The hinge: keep the butter paleMelt the butter gently and stop before it colours. Browned butter here means the crumbs scorch before the dish beneath them is hot, since they finish browning in the oven.
- "Crums"Simply crumbs, a variant spelling found in older American cookbooks. The recipe does not say which sort of crumb is meant; soft crumbs rubbed from stale bread are the likeliest reading, and they absorb more fat than dried crumbs.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon per cup gives crumbs that are barely coated and stay very crisp; three gives a richer, sandier topping that clumps. The middle of the range splits the difference.
- Mix off the heatThe recipe does not say, but pulling the pan from the burner before adding the crumbs keeps them from beginning to fry and browning in patches.
- YieldOne cup of buttered crumbs tops a 1 1/2-quart baking dish in a thin layer, or about an 8-inch square dish.
- Browning in the ovenOn a dish baked at 350F the topping needs roughly 20 to 30 minutes to colour; under a broiler it takes 1 to 2 minutes and wants watching, as soft crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- StorageBecause they contain butter, keep them refrigerated in a covered jar for a few days rather than in the cupboard.
Buttered crumbs belong to the era when a cook was expected to build dishes from a small stock of prepared components rather than as a recipe in its own right. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued household volumes for the same readership of middle-class women running a house with little or no hired help, and its instructions run to the brief, assumed-competence style seen here. Soft crumbs from stale bread were the natural home for the end of a loaf in a period before sliced bread and before packaged crumbs were widely sold; the buttered version is the plain relative of the French gratin topping, where crumbs are enriched with butter and often cheese to protect a sauce from the oven's dry heat.