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Pulled Bread
Pull the pieces of crumb from a loaf of bread and place in the oven to brown. These may be stored in tins, but are considered better when quite fresh.
Two sentences in the original, and almost everything that matters is left out: the state of the loaf, the oven, and the time. Here is what the kitchen assumed you already knew.
- Use a fresh, warm loafUse a fresh loaf -- the original says nothing about the state of the loaf, but pulled bread is generally understood to be made from a newly baked one, while the crumb still tears in soft ragged lumps. Take the top crust off and pull the interior out in pieces with two forks or your fingers rather than cutting it. The torn surfaces are the point; they crisp into peaks that a sliced surface will not give you.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for 10 to 15 minutes browns the pieces through without hardening them into rusks. Spread them in a single layer on a sheet and turn them once so the ragged sides colour evenly.
- What "brown" means hereGolden and crisp on the outside, still slightly yielding in the centre of the larger pieces. Taken further they dry hard all through.
- Butter or no butterNo fat is added here, which is consistent with the note that it may be stored in tins. Brushing with melted butter before baking gives a richer result but will shorten the keeping.
- StorageThe original allows tins but says it is better quite fresh. An airtight tin will hold it a short while, and a few minutes back in a moderate oven will revive it. After that it is crumbs for stuffing.
- Yield and serviceService -- The recipe gives no yield. Pulled bread was a table bread of the formal service, going out with soups, salads and cheese in the place a modern kitchen would put a crusty roll.
Pulled bread belongs to the English service that American hotel dining rooms inherited wholesale in the late nineteenth century, and it appears in period cookbooks in much the same brief form throughout. Its appeal was textural rather than culinary: a stiffly formal table wanted something crisp and irregular to break the run of soup, fish and entree courses, and pulled bread supplied it without the labour of pastry. The recipe's brevity here is telling. Oscar Tschirky records only the two facts a cook might get wrong, that the crumb is pulled rather than cut and that it is best eaten the day it is made.