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BREAD STICKS (Cream one-quarter cup)
Cream one-quarter cup of butter with one and one-half tablespoons sugar. Add one cup scalded milk and one-half teaspoon of salt. Dissolve a yeast cake in one-fourth cup of lukewarm water and add to the first prepared mixture, together with the beaten white of one egg and three and one-half cups flour. Knead, set to rise, shape into sticks and let rise again. Then bake, commencing in a very hot oven and then lessening the heat that the sticks may become dry and crisp. These sticks should be about eight inches in length and about as large round as one's thumb. Begin shaping by cutting with a small biscuit cutter and then rolling over and over with the hands until the desired length is obtained. The ends should be blunt and rounded. For serving with salad, make these sticks half length and serve piled log-cabin fashion on a doily.
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A straightforward enriched yeast dough taken to the point of crispness rather than softness. Two things decide whether it works: the temperature of the milk when the yeast goes in, and the two-stage bake.
- Cool the milk firstThe butter, sugar and scalded milk are combined before the yeast is added, and scalded milk is far hotter than yeast will tolerate; well above lukewarm it is damaged, and at higher temperatures killed outright. Let the mixture come down to lukewarm before the dissolved yeast joins it.
- Yeast cakeOne yeast cake means a cake of compressed fresh yeast; the familiar small cake is about 0.6 oz, though cake sizes varied in this period. One packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast is the usual substitute; the quarter cup of lukewarm water still works for either.
- The two-stage ovenThe recipe gives no figures; "very hot" in books of this period is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 450-500F. Use the high heat only for the first several minutes, to set and colour the sticks, then drop to a slow oven (roughly 300-325F) and leave them until the interior has dried out. Bake straight through at high heat and you get bread, not sticks.
- Crispness is about moisture, not colourThey are done when they snap rather than bend. If they soften after cooling, return them to a 300F oven for a few minutes and cool on a rack, not on the sheet.
- Flour is a starting figureThree and a half cups is about 15-17 oz depending on how it is scooped. The dough should be firm and slightly dry so it will roll into a pencil without slumping; add flour by the spoonful rather than by the half cup.
- ShapingCutting rounds with a small biscuit cutter and rolling each one out is only a way of getting even portions. Dividing the dough by weight does the same thing faster. Roll on an unfloured surface so the dough grips and lengthens.
- Second rise should be shortSticks that proof until puffy will bloat and lose the thumb-thin profile. Twenty to thirty minutes, until just barely risen, is enough.
- YieldAbout 24 to 30 eight-inch sticks, or twice that number in the half-length salad size. They keep several days in a tin and revive in a low oven.
Bread sticks in American cookbooks of this period are often associated with an Italian import filtered through hotel dining rooms, where thin, hard, dry sticks were set out with soup and salad as a genteel alternative to a roll. The insistence on precise dimensions -- eight inches, thumb-thick, blunt ends -- and on serving the short version stacked "log-cabin fashion on a doily" says more about the era's table than about the dough. The technique itself is the old one for any hard-baked bread, from ship's biscuit to rusk: start hot to set the crust, then hold at a low heat until the moisture has left, which is also what keeps it edible for several days in a covered tin.