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Chapter III-Soup Accessories
OUP may be served with many accompaniments, such as crisped crackers, cheese sticks, pulled bread, not to mention the many varieties of croutons, force-meat balls, noodles and vegetable pastes which may placed in the soup itself. Grated Parmesan cheese is also passed with many kinds of soup, a spoonful merely, being sprinkled on each portion when served.
Some of the best liked accompaniments for soup are the following: CROUTONS-Cut stale bread into slices of about one-third of an inch and remove all crust. Spread with butter, cut in cubes and bake in oven until delicately browned. These cubes of bread may also be fried in deep fat or sautéd in just enough butter to keep them from burning. Put in soup at time of serving.
The passage is half a survey of soup garnishes and half a working crouton recipe. The croutons are the part with instructions, and they repay attention to two things: even thickness and constant watching.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the original. In a modern oven, buttered cubes bake well at around 350F, turning once, for 12-15 minutes; at higher heat the butter browns before the centre dries and you get a crouton that goes soft in the soup.
- One-third of an inchThat slice thickness gives cubes a little under a centimetre on a side. Thicker cubes tend to stay bready in the middle, thinner ones soften quickly in the broth.
- Stale bread is not optionalDay-old bread with a dry crumb absorbs butter without turning greasy and holds its shape in liquid. Fresh bread soaks up fat and collapses. A firm white loaf or a plain sourdough works; soft sandwich bread does not.
- Frying in deep fatIf you take the fried route, hold the fat at 350-360F and work in small batches, lifting the cubes out the moment they turn pale gold. They colour further off the heat, and a pan crowded with bread drops the fat temperature and produces sodden cubes.
- Add at the last momentThe instruction to "put in soup at time of serving" is the hinge of the recipe. Croutons added in the kitchen and carried to the table have already gone limp; they belong in the bowl in front of the diner.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield. As a rough guide, four slices of bread make something like two cups of cubes. Cooled completely and kept airtight they will hold for a few days, though buttered cubes stale and go rancid sooner than plain ones; recrisp briefly in a moderate oven before serving.
- Pulled breadAn accompaniment the book names without explaining. Loaf interior is torn into rough pieces by hand while still warm and dried in a slow oven until crisp all through, giving ragged shards rather than neat cubes.
- Parmesan"Grated Parmesan" in a book of this period meant a hard aged cheese grated to a powder at home. Buy a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana and grate it yourself; the pre-grated tubs are drier and often carry anti-caking starch that clouds a clear broth.
Croutons are simply the French croûton, a diminutive of croûte, crust, and the word is generally traced into English cookery writing through the nineteenth-century French kitchen along with the rest of the soup-garnish vocabulary. A chapter of "soup accessories" made sense because soup was the standing first course of the American dinner service, and a course served plain looked thin.