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Grissini and Porridge
To make grissini keep back some of the dough of Emslie's Breakfast Rolls (see Rolls), cut, and roll it out with your hands into strips, when it must also rise some time again like the rolls, in the meat screen. Bake on a buttered baking sheet. "Café au lait" should be the true tint when sent up to table.
Grissini. No. 2. (Mrs. Buchanan. 1891.) 1 lb. flour, 1 oz. butter, ½ oz. German yeast. A little salt. The yeast dissolved in tepid milk; then mix the butter, 1 egg and milk into the flour as in making bread. Let it rise for about an hour, then divide into several pieces and roll out in straws the thickness of a wooden skewer. Roll in coarse salt if wished, at the finish. Bake slowly. They must be crisp.
Lady Clark considers them better without salt.
Grissini. No. 3. "Manière de faire les Gressins." "1. Dans 10 kilos de farine il faut mettre un demi kilo de levain. 2. Farine de poment première qualité. 3. La pâte un peu dure. 4. Les laisser lever 4 heures dans une chambre fermée. 5. Il faut (avant de les mettre lever) les couper en petits morceaux comme un doigt et les disposer deux à deux sur une planche mouillée. 6. Lorsqu'ils sont levés on les prend par les deux bouts et on les tire de la longueur de trois empares (main ouverte).
Dans 10 kilos il faut mettre une poignée de sel; il faut les mouiller de temps en temps (avant de les mettre au four) avec de l'eau chaude." The paste is fermented in wooden bowls in lumps kept constantly moistened; then spread out as required for use into a thick oblong sheet, which is cut into pieces rather thicker than, and as long as, a finger, and laid side by side on a moistened board; each piece in turn taken up at either end with the finger and thumb and steadily and quickly drawn out till 2 feet long. A long thin wooden shovel is sprinkled with coarse meal and the gressins are laid on it, put into the oven, slipped off the board, and left to bake a nice brown.
They should be cold before you eat them. * Grissini. See also Birk Hall Rolls, under Rolls.
Porridge - Barley Meal. (I. Emslie. 1893.) Have 1 qt. of water boiling. Into this scatter gradually three handfuls of barley meal - add a little salt. add a little salt.
To prevent lumps, or "knots" in the porridge, stir the whole time it cooks - till it gets absolutely smooth - then it is ready to serve. [To mix the meal for this porridge, it is best to take equal proportions of barley meal and whole meal, that is, the wheat flour as prepared in England for "seconds bread." It is softer and richer than Oatmeal Porridge, and makes a variety.] Porridge. See also Invalid Cookery.
Three versions of Turin breadsticks and a Scots barley porridge, all recorded as notes rather than as formal recipes. The essential point for the grissini is that they are dried out as much as baked: a slow oven and a thin stick, taken to the colour of milky coffee and left to cool hard.
- German yeastThis means fresh compressed baker's yeast. The 1½ oz called for with 1 lb of flour is a very heavy dose by modern standards; about 10-14 g fresh, or 1½ teaspoons instant dried, will raise a pound of flour in the hour given.
- "Bake slowly"The book names no temperature; a low oven, in the region of 300-325F, suits the purpose. Grissini want a long, low bake so the interior dries through before the surface colours; pulled out too early they go leathery within a day. The "café au lait" tint is the doneness cue given in No. 1; No. 2 asks only that they be crisp, and No. 3 that they bake "a nice brown".
- The meat screenA hinged metal hood set before an open fire, used to shield roasting joints and to keep things warm. It served here as a draught-free proving spot; an oven with only the light on does the same job.
- Levain, not yeast, in No. 3Half a kilo of levain to ten kilos of flour is a 5 per cent sourdough starter, hence the four-hour rise. "Farine de poment" is almost certainly a slip for froment, wheat. Scaled down, that is 500 g flour to 25 g active starter.
- An empanA handspan, thumb-tip to little-finger-tip on an open hand, roughly 8-9 inches. Three of them gives the two feet the English gloss specifies. The dough must be slack enough to draw without tearing but firm enough to hold the stretch, which is what "la pâte un peu dure" is guarding against.
- Thickness"The thickness of a wooden skewer" is about 4 mm. Anything much stouter will not crisp at a slow oven temperature and will stay bready in the middle.
- Barley meal proportionsThree handfuls to a quart of water is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of meal to 4 cups water, thinner than modern porridge. The recipe sets no time, only stirring until the porridge is absolutely smooth; it thickens considerably as it stands.
- "Seconds bread" flourA high-extraction wheat flour, coarser than white but not wholemeal, roughly what is sold today as light wholemeal or 85 per cent extraction flour. The bracketed note suggests half barley meal, half of this.
Grissini are a Turin speciality, and their invention is traditionally traced to seventeenth-century Piedmont and often told as a tale of a court baker making a light, digestible bread for a sickly young prince of Savoy; the story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere firmly. What is certain is that by the nineteenth century the long hand-pulled gressin was a fixture of Piedmontese tables and travelled home in the notebooks of well-connected British travellers. Lady Clark of Tillypronie was one such: wife of a diplomat, she collected recipes from cooks, hostesses and household servants across Europe and Britain, and her manuscripts were published posthumously in 1909. This page is a fair sample of her method, with the same item given three ways under three names and the French version left untranslated in the informant's own words, then glossed. That a Scottish barley porridge from a household cook follows immediately after is entirely characteristic of the book.<|reserved_200034|>