Croutons
1-Cut bread in one-fourth-inch slices, then in strips and cubes. Put two or three tablespoons Mazola in a baking pan, stir the cubes in it, dust with salt and bake in a hot oven, stirring occasionally, to insure even browning.
A brand-pamphlet recipe stripped to its essentials. The only things missing are a temperature, a time and a warning about how fast cubes go from gold to black.
- Hot ovenIn books of this period a "hot oven" is usually taken as somewhere in the 400-450F range. At that heat quarter-inch cubes should brown in roughly 8 to 12 minutes, so check early and stir.
- MazolaMazola is corn oil, and the brand name written into the instruction points to a book issued in connection with its maker, Corn Products. Any neutral oil works; melted butter browns faster and burns sooner.
- BreadThe recipe specifies nothing beyond "bread"; day-old firm white bread suits it best. Fresh soft sandwich bread absorbs oil unevenly and steams rather than crisps.
- Oil quantityTwo or three tablespoons coats about four cups of cubes. More than that and the croutons fry rather than dry, leaving them greasy once cool.
- Even browningA single layer in the pan matters more than the stirring. Crowded cubes trap steam and the centres stay soft.
- DonenessPull them while they are a shade paler than you want; they crisp further as they cool. They should snap, not bend.
- Yield and keepingFour slices of bread give somewhere around two cups of croutons, depending on the loaf, enough for four bowls of soup or a salad for four. Cooled completely, they should keep up to a week in a tin.
The word comes from the French croûton, a diminutive of croûte, crust, and the thing itself is older than the name in English: fried or oven-dried bread has garnished soups and stood under roast birds for centuries as a way of using bread past its best. What is new here is the fat. This recipe appears in a cookbook connected with Mazola, the corn oil brought to American kitchens by the Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century, and pamphlets of this kind were one common way a new manufactured ingredient taught cooks to use it. Butter and lard were the familiar fats for such work; printing a familiar luncheon staple with a bottled vegetable oil in place of them appears to be the point of the page.