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Fairy Bread
2 slices stale bread I inch thick Milk Vanilla extract I beaten egg Hot fat Sugar Preserves Cut the bread into strips four inches long, and one and one-half inches wide. Dip quickly into a little milk flavored with the vanilla, and drain.
Now dip into the egg and fry in smoking hot fat to a golden color; sprinkle with sugar, and put a teaspoonful of preserves on each piece.
Another method.
Cut stale sponge cake in one inch slices, toast a golden brown and cut in two inch squares.
Beat to a froth one-half of a tumbler of quince jelly, and when very light add gradually the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs. Heap this on the pieces of toast, and top each half with a candied cherry.
Serve with cream.
Two versions of the same idea: something plain made showy with sugar and preserves. The first is essentially French toast fingers; the second is an uncooked jelly meringue on toasted sponge cake and needs more thought.
- The hinge: bread must be stale and dryFresh bread cut an inch thick will soak up the milk and collapse in the fat. Use bread at least a day old, and dip it into the milk for no more than a second or two, then let it drain before it goes into the egg.
- "Smoking hot fat" means about 375F"Smoking hot fat" is hotter than most modern frying instructions -- The smoke point of lard or clarified drippings falls somewhere in the 360-390F range, depending on how clean the fat is, so the direction is a hot fry rather than a slow one. If you use a thermometer, 365-375F works: below that the strips absorb grease, above it the egg coating scorches before the inside warms. Fry an inch or so deep in a heavy pan, turning once, one to two minutes a side.
- Sugar goes on hot, preserves on warmSprinkle the sugar the moment the strips leave the fat so it clings, but let them cool for a minute before spooning on the preserves or the jam will slide off.
- A tumbler is about a cupA tumbler is usually reckoned at about a cup -- Tumbler sizes varied, but on that reading half a tumbler of quince jelly is roughly 1/2 cup, about 4 to 5 oz. It should be a firm, well-set jelly; a soft modern jam will not whip to a froth.
- Quince jelly, and what to use insteadQuince was a common preserving fruit because it is high in pectin and sets hard. Crabapple, redcurrant or a stiff apple jelly behaves much the same way; the flavour is more floral with quince.
- The second method contains raw egg whiteThe whipped jelly and beaten whites are heaped on the toast and served without further cooking, so the whites are never heated. If you want to make this version, use pasteurized whites in the carton, or follow a current recipe for a cooked Italian meringue.
- Sponge cake, toastedSlice it an inch thick and toast it under a broiler rather than in a toaster, where it will jam and burn. Cake browns much faster than bread, so watch it and turn once.
- YieldTwo slices of bread give about four to six strips at the stated 4 by 1.5 inches, enough for two or three as a pudding course. Both versions are best assembled at the last minute; the fried strips go leathery and the meringue weeps as it stands.
"Fairy" attached itself to all sorts of small, pretty, inexpensive food in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — fairy cakes, fairy butter, fairy toast. This one is a stale-bread pudding in party clothes: the first method is the same egg-and-milk dip that produces French toast, pain perdu, or what English cookbooks of the period called poor knights of Windsor, cut into fingers so it looks deliberate. Books like this made a selling point of turning leftovers into something presentable, and the sponge cake variant does the same job for yesterday's cake. The candied cherry on top is the period's standard finishing flourish.