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Bread Sticks
Remove the crusts from any slices of stale, closetextured bread, and cut in strips about five inches long and one-half inch wide. Roll in melted butter and brown delicately in the oven, or fry in deep, hot fat without rolling in butter. These can be served with cheese instead of crackers.
A straightforward way to turn dry bread into something worth putting on the table. Everything depends on the bread being close-grained and genuinely stale.
- The bread matters most"Close-textured" means a tight, fine crumb — a firm white sandwich loaf or a pain de mie, not an open-holed sourdough or ciabatta. Airy bread tears into strips instead of cutting cleanly and drinks up butter unevenly.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperature or time at all. A moderate oven (around 350F) is a reasonable modern guess for the buttered sticks, turning once and watching them rather than timing them; hotter than that and the butter is likely to colour before the centre has dried.
- "Brown delicately"The target is straw-coloured and crisp all the way through, not toast-brown. A stick that is dark outside and leathery inside has been rushed.
- Deep fryingFor the unbuttered version, ordinary deep-frying heat (roughly 360-375F) and a very short time in the fat — dry bread browns fast and scorches soon after, so lift the batch as soon as it colours.
- Butter quantityNo amount is given. The recipe says to roll the strips in melted butter, so melt enough to coat them; a lighter hand gives a crisper, less rich stick.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield; at half an inch wide you will get several sticks from each slice. Fully cooled and kept dry in a tin they will hold for some days, and can be re-crisped in a low oven.
- SeasoningThe original leaves them plain, as a cracker substitute. Salt, pepper, or grated hard cheese added before the oven is entirely in keeping and does not fight the intent.
Books of "left overs" were a recognisable publishing niche in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, addressed to households anxious about visible waste. Stale bread was a standard topic in them, since a domestic loaf of the period went dry quickly and there was no wrapped, preservative-laden bread to fall back on. The suggestion here — that the sticks stand in for crackers with cheese — looks like the practical heart of the entry: crackers had to be bought, while the bread was already paid for. The result resembles Italian grissini, though arrived at from the other direction, by drying out an existing loaf rather than baking dough thin in the first place.