Home › Breakfast And Tea Cakes › Bread Puffs
Bread Puffs
If the wheat bread is light enough for the oven at breakfast time, have ready some hot lard in a deep kettle; with the thumb and two fingers pull up some of the dough quite thin, and cut it some two or three inches in length; as these pieces are cut, drop them in the lard and fry like doughnuts. At table they are eaten like biscuit; they may also be served in a vegetable dish with a dressing of hot cream, seasoned with pepper and salt. - In the Kitchen.
This is scrap-dough cookery: a handful of risen bread dough, stretched thin and fried while the rest of the batch goes to the oven. Almost everything depends on the state of the dough and the heat of the fat.
- "Light enough for the oven"The hinge of the recipe. The dough must be fully proofed — doubled, slack, holding a fingerprint — the same point at which you would bake it. Underproofed dough fries into dense, doughy ropes with a raw seam in the middle.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot lard in a deep kettle" and gives no figure. In modern practice, dough of this kind fries well somewhere around 360-375F: much below that the pieces drink oil and go greasy; much above, the outside colours before the inside sets. A thermometer helps, and the fat needs to recover between batches.
- Lard or notThe recipe specifies lard, which fries clean; leaf lard can be found from butchers and some grocers. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; butter does not.
- ShapingPulling with thumb and two fingers gives an irregular, thin, ragged strip two or three inches long — closer to a beignet than a doughnut. Thin is the point: thick pieces will not cook through before browning.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time. Thin pieces cook fast: expect a minute or so a side, turning once, and watch them rather than the clock. They puff quickly and float. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp.
- The cream dressingHot cream seasoned with pepper and salt, poured over the puffs in a serving dish — a savoury treatment closer to biscuits and gravy than to a sweet fritter. Warm the cream through without boiling it down.
- YieldThe original assumes you are stealing from a bread batch and gives no quantities at all. A pound of dough pulled this thin would make a couple of dozen small pieces at most, breakfast for a few people. They are best within minutes of frying and do not reheat well.
The credit line "In the Kitchen" is generally taken to point to Elizabeth S. Miller's cookbook of that name, one of many volumes the compilers of The Dixie Cook-Book quarried for material — nineteenth-century American cookbooks borrowed from one another freely and, by the standards of the day, honestly, with a source name at the foot of the entry. The dish itself belongs to a very old and very widespread habit: bread dough is the cheapest thing in the kitchen on baking day, and a pinch of it dropped in hot fat becomes something else entirely. The same impulse produced beignets in Louisiana, sopaipillas in the Southwest, langos in Hungary and the fried "holy pokes" and "huffjuffs" recorded in New England. What marks this version as a breakfast dish rather than a sweet is the finish — no sugar, no syrup, but hot cream with pepper and salt, served in a vegetable dish and eaten in place of biscuit.