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PULLED BREAD (Take freshly baked bread)
Take freshly baked bread and remove the entire crust. With a fork pull the tender bread into irregular pieces about a finger in length, and somewhat wider. Place on paper in a dripping-pan and dry in a moderate oven with the door open. When dry to the center of each piece, close the door and bake till brown.
A simple oven-dried bread accompaniment that depends entirely on the loaf being warm and soft when you tear it. Everything else is patience.
- The hinge: use the loaf warmPulled bread only works while the crumb is still tender and elastic enough to tear into ragged, feathery pieces. A day-old loaf will crumble into cubes and crumbs instead, and the whole point is the irregular torn surface that browns unevenly.
- Use a plain white loafNothing in the text specifies the bread, but a close-crumbed household white loaf suits it best. A very open, holey artisan loaf gives thin fragile shards, and anything enriched with butter, milk or sugar will colour before it has dried through.
- "Moderate oven" with the door openA moderate oven is conventionally taken as around 350F, but propped open it runs cooler and vents steam; treat the first stage as drying at roughly 250-275F. Then close the door and let it come up to colour.
- Dripping-pan and paperA dripping-pan is a shallow roasting pan; a rimmed baking sheet is the equivalent. "Paper" means plain kitchen or baking paper, keeping the pieces off hot metal so they do not scorch underneath.
- TimingThe recipe gives none; allow perhaps 20-30 minutes of drying, then 5-10 minutes of browning, judging by the recipe's own test. Break a thick piece in half to check: no soft or leathery core, or it will go tough as it cools.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on the size of the loaf. Cooled completely, it will keep for some days in a tin; recrisp for a few minutes in a warm oven if it softens.
- ServingMeant to go with soup, salad, cheese or oysters, in place of crackers or toast. Best served the day it is made, when the outside is brittle and the interior still light.
Pulled bread was a standard of late-Victorian and Edwardian tables on both sides of the Atlantic, and it belongs to the older logic of the household loaf: bread was baked at home in quantity, and every stage of its life had a use. Torn rather than sliced, it gave a rough surface that crisped into something closer to a cracker than toast, and it was served with soup. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in the same spirit as its sewing guides: small accomplishments that made an ordinary household table look considered. Pulled bread cost nothing but oven heat, which was already lit for the baking.