Croutons
Cut stale bread into slices about one-third of an inch thick, and remove all crust. Spread with butter, cut in cubes and bake in the oven until delicately browned. If preferred, these cubes of bread may be fried in deep fat or sautéd in just enough fat to keep them from burning. Put in soup at time of serving, or pass in a separate dish, permitting each person to put as many croutons as he may wish in his portion of soup.
A method rather than a formula, and the only real variables are the size of the dice and the heat. A few specifics the original leaves out.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your range. Use 350-375F and turn the cubes once or twice; they should dry through as they colour, which takes 10-15 minutes. Hotter than 400F browns the outside before the centre dries, and the crouton goes soft in the soup.
- Butter first, cut secondButtering the whole slice and then dicing is faster and more even than tossing cubes in melted butter, which may be why the recipe is written in that order. Softened, not melted, butter spreads without tearing stale bread.
- Stale means dry, not oldA day-or-two-old loaf with a close crumb is what is wanted. Fresh bread compresses under the knife and absorbs fat rather than crisping. Modern sandwich bread is generally softer and wetter than bread of the period; leave slices uncovered for a few hours if you have nothing stale.
- Cube sizeA third-of-an-inch slice cut into a third-inch dice is small - roughly the size of a pea once shrunk. The recipe gives no dice measurement, but small cubes suit soup, where large croutons displace the spoonful.
- Deep fatIf frying, 360-375F and small batches; the cubes brown in under a minute and go from gold to black quickly. Drain on paper. Sauteing in a shallow pan needs constant motion, as the recipe hints with "just enough fat to keep them from burning."
- Yield and timingTwo slices of bread give roughly a cup of croutons, enough for four servings of soup. Make them the same day; they soften within a few hours in humid air. A sealed tin holds them a couple of days, and a few minutes in a 300F oven revives them.
- Serving separatelyThe recommendation to pass them in a dish is the practical one. Croutons dropped into the tureen are sodden before the second serving is poured.
The word is simply the French crouton, a diminutive of croûte, crust - the small crust. Fried or oven-dried bread in soup is far older than the French name, and every bread-eating cuisine has some form of it, from the sops of medieval English cookery to Italian bread soups; the thrift of using stale bread rather than throwing it away is often said to lie behind such dishes. What is telling here is the placement: croutons appear in the soup chapter as a garnish among garnishes, at a time when service a la russe had made the soup course a formal opening to dinner. The instruction to pass them separately, so each guest may take as many as he wishes, may well belong to that same table etiquette.