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Steamed Bread
The very dry, hard pieces may be used in this way: Heat a griddle hot, butter it well, dip the pieces of bread quickly into hot salted water, and brown on both sides on the griddle. Eat with butter or with syrup.
To Freshen Dry Rolls or a Loaf of Dry Bread Dip them quickly into cold water, drain, and heat in oven.
Bread Griddle-cakes (with Sour Milk) Use equal quantities of sour milk and small, broken pieces of bread. Mix and let stand, covered, over one or two nights. Bits of rice may be added to this mixture if desired. In warm weather a little salt may be put with it. (In this case omit adding salt later.) When ready to use, put through colander. For each pint of mixture use one egg, one teaspoonful soda, one teaspoonful sugar, one-fourth teaspoonful salt, and about three-quarters of a cup sifted flour. It is always wise to bake a small cake first, that any lack in ingredients may be remedied at once. An extra yolk or small amount of uncooked egg may be added if at hand. Bake on hot griddle and serve with syrup.
Three separate uses for stale bread, run together in the original: griddled slices, a revived loaf, and a soaked-bread pancake batter. The batter is the one that needs real attention.
- Do not sour modern milk on the counterThe instruction to leave milk and bread covered at room temperature "over one or two nights" assumes raw milk, in which lactic bacteria usually dominate and acidify the milk; pasteurized milk carries no such culture and is more likely simply to spoil. Use cultured buttermilk instead, and keep the soak in the refrigerator, where the bread will soften just as well over a night or two.
- Proportions for the batterEqual volumes of buttermilk and torn bread. Per pint of the strained mixture: 1 egg, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, about 3/4 cup sifted flour.
- "Put through colander"This means pressing the swollen bread through the holes with a spoon or the back of a ladle to break up lumps, not draining it. A food mill or a few pulses of an immersion blender does the same job faster; leave a little texture rather than reducing it to paste.
- Soda and acidA full teaspoon of soda per pint is calibrated to genuinely sour milk. Cultured buttermilk is milder, so taste-check by baking the test cake the recipe sensibly calls for — a soapy or metallic edge means too much soda for the acid present. Get the batter onto the griddle promptly once the soda goes in.
- Griddle heatThe recipe says only "hot griddle"; in modern terms a medium setting suits these cakes. They are heavier than flour-only pancakes and can scorch outside before the center sets if the pan is too hot, so give them a little longer per side than you would a plain batter.
- Freshening a dry loafA quick dip in cold water, then a short spell in a moderate oven; the original gives neither time nor temperature. It works because the wetted crust steams the interior, and the effect is short-lived, so serve at once.
- The salted-water dipFor the griddled slices the water is salted rather than plain, so it seasons the bread as it wets it. Butter the griddle generously; dry bread drinks fat.
- The rice"Bits of rice" means leftover cooked rice, added to the soak. Keep it to a few tablespoons per pint or the cakes turn gummy.
Books of this kind proliferated between the 1890s and the First World War, when domestic-science writers were arguing that thrift was a measurable skill rather than a moral posture, and a chapter on stale bread was near-obligatory. The sour-milk batter belongs to an older logic still: before household refrigeration, milk that had turned was not waste but an ingredient, and its acidity was the standard partner for baking soda in quick breads and griddle cakes — which is why nineteenth-century American recipes call for sour milk so freely and modern ones substitute buttermilk. The instruction to bake one small test cake first is the most telling line here, an admission that the strength of the soured milk, the dryness of the bread and the size of the eggs were all unknowable in advance, so the cook calibrated by tasting rather than by measuring.