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To Bake the Fluttes
After lapse of an hour remove cloth and immediately set in oven to bake for thirty minutes, or until they have attained a nice golden colour all around, remove and serve.
This is the closing step of a longer bread recipe rather than a complete one — the dough, its shaping and its first rise happen on the preceding page. Read as a baking instruction, it is still useful, and the parts left unsaid are the parts worth filling in.
- What the hour under cloth isThat covered hour is the final proof of shaped loaves, not a rest of the bulk dough. The cloth keeps a skin from forming; at ordinary room temperature an hour is about right for a lean or lightly enriched dough, less in a warm kitchen.
- No temperature is givenBooks of this period generally left the reading of the oven to the baker's judgement. Slim French-style loaves of this kind are usually baked hot, and a modern oven in the region of 425F is a reasonable starting point; watch them, as loaves this slender may take their colour well before the thirty minutes are up.
- Colour is the only doneness cue offered"A nice golden colour all around" is a surface reading and can mislead on a thick loaf. An internal temperature of 190-200F is the reliable check for a lean wheat bread.
- Handle the proofed loaves gentlyThe instruction to remove the cloth and set the loaves in the oven "immediately" matters: a fully proofed dough deflates if it stands around or is jarred. Have the oven already at heat before the hour is up.
- SteamCommercial bakers' ovens were steamed to give loaves of this kind their glaze and crisp shell, and a wood-fired oven holds more moisture than a domestic one. A pan of boiling water on the floor of the oven for the first ten minutes approximates it.
- ServingBreads of this shape are at their best within a few hours of baking. They stale quickly because they carry little fat, and are better refreshed in a hot oven than wrapped.
"Fluttes" appears to be an anglicised spelling of the French flûtes -- flutes -- the long, slender loaves of the same family as the baguette and the ficelle, named for their shape rather than any distinct dough. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York as chef and manager, compiled The International Cook Book in the first decade of the twentieth century as a survey of what a well-travelled professional kitchen might be asked to produce, and its French bread entries reflect the dominance of French practice in American restaurant cooking of the period.