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Crouton of Fried Bread
Remove all the crust from a loaf of bread and trim the crumb into a block eight inches high by six inches square at the base, and taper it off to three and a half inches at the top. Place in a pan a large lump of clarified butter or lard put over the fire until it begins to boil, then put the bread in and fry it, turning it until nicely browned on all sides. Drain the bread on a sieve, and stick onto a dish with some paste made of flour and the white of an egg, which will retain it firmly where it is placed.
This is not a garnish for soup but a socle — a carved pedestal of fried bread on which a roast, a game bird or a chaud-froid centerpiece was set for display. Read it as a piece of platter architecture rather than as something to be eaten out of hand.
- You need a Pullman loafYou need a large square-sided loaf -- A block eight inches tall and six inches square at the base calls for a big square sandwich loaf (pain de mie) with a tight, even crumb; note that a standard Pullman loaf is only about four inches square in section, so an unusually large pan loaf is wanted. A round or open-crumbed artisan bread will not yield the shape, and an airy crumb collapses in the fat.
- Use day-old breadFresh crumb is too soft to carve cleanly and drinks fat. Bread a day or two old, or briefly dried in a 250F oven, holds the taper and browns rather than sogs.
- Fat temperature"Until it begins to boil" describes clarified butter or lard shimmering and just beginning to move; the original gives no temperature, but a moderate frying heat in the region of 350F answers the description. Butter that has not been clarified will scorch its milk solids and blacken the crust long before the block colors evenly.
- Frying a block this sizeFew home pans will submerge an eight-inch column. Work in a deep pot with two or three inches of fat, turning the block onto each face in turn and basting the exposed sides with a spoon. Tongs plus a wide spatula are safer than a fork, which tears the crumb.
- The hinge: even browning, then dry heatTurn often and keep the color uniform; a pale face will soften once the socle stands under a moist garnish. After draining on a rack or sieve, let it finish drying in a warm oven so the shell sets hard.
- The flour-and-egg-white pasteA stiff slurry of flour with raw egg white, dabbed under the base, glues the socle to the platter and keeps it from sliding when carved around. It is structural cement, not food, and should not be eaten.
- Yield and modern useOne loaf makes one socle. It functioned as a stand for a platter rather than as a portion, and such bases were generally display rather than eating; the trimmed offcuts, however, make excellent croutons if fried separately.
The recipe is often traced to Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Waldorf book, though the page itself does not securely establish that, nor that it was written for grand Waldorf banquet service. Bases like this \em>socles in the French kitchen vocabulary such hotels worked in — were carved from bread, rice paste, tallow or even blocks of ice, and existed so that a galantine, a cold salmon or a dressed pheasant could be presented above the level of the tray rather than lying flat on it. The word "crouton" here carries its older, broader sense of any shaped piece of fried bread, a diminutive of croûte, crust, from Latin crusta; the small cubes in a bowl of soup are only one surviving descendant. A professional cookbook of the 1890s that gives measured dimensions for a pedestal but no seasoning at all is a curiosity of the period's priorities.