Home › Soup Accessories › Mock Almonds
Mock Almonds
Cut stale bread in thin slices and shape to represent almonds. Proceed as with croutons, and use in the same way.
A garnish rather than a dish: bread cut to the shape of blanched almonds, crisped, and scattered over soup. The instruction to "proceed as with croutons" assumes you know the book's crouton method, which is to fry the shapes in hot butter or deep fat until pale gold, or to brown them in the oven.
- The hingeCut them small and thin, roughly the size and outline of a blanched almond, with tapered ends. Anything larger reads as a crouton and loses the whole conceit.
- Stale bread means dry breadDay-old firm white bread cut with a thin sharp knife holds an edge; fresh bread tears and soaks up fat. A close-crumbed sandwich loaf works better than an open artisan crumb.
- Oven routeIf you prefer not to fry, brush lightly with melted butter and bake at 350F for 8 to 12 minutes, turning once, until dry and just coloured. They should snap, not bend.
- Frying temperatureButter alone browns before the bread dries; use clarified butter or half butter and half neutral oil at about 350F. Thirty to sixty seconds a side is enough.
- YieldTwo slices of bread give enough for four to six servings. Allow six or eight per bowl, added at the table.
- Which soupsSave these for clear soups and smooth purees, where the shape shows. In a chunky soup the effect is invisible and the point of the trouble is lost.
- KeepingCooled completely, they hold a week in a tin. Any softening is fixed by five minutes in a 300F oven.
Nineteenth-century soup service leaned heavily on small crisp accessories, and cookbooks of the period list pages of them: croutons in dice, in rounds, in fancy cuts, plus fried noodles, cheese straws and forcemeat balls. "Mock" dishes of this sort were a standard technique of the era, from mock turtle soup to mock cream, and usually meant a cheap material shaped or flavoured to stand in for a costly one. Almonds were generally reckoned a luxury, priced well above bread, so cutting bread into almond shapes gave a garnish that looked deliberate and expensive at almost no cost. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, also issued a cook book.