Sherri Steel unearths some archive recipes for using up old bread, which are set to be recreated in York Castle Museum’s working kitchen.
Recipe book from about 1930
Crumbs! It’s amazing the amount of food that can be created from a few slices of stale old bread…
I’ve been researching old recipes for some historic cookery demonstrations at the Castle Museum in March (Click here for details).
Avoiding waste does seem to be a topical subject at the moment and many of the recipes I found date from the times of rationing.
Cooking with stale bread didn’t just happen in times of austerity though, and it has been used for many things – toast, puddings, food for invalids. Breadcrumbs were often used in Roman and medieval recipes – a sage stuffing appears in a Roman recipe for baked dormouse!
Here’s some of the recipes we’ll be recreating:
Tart for an Ember Day
There were many recipes for Ember Day tarts. An Ember Day was one of the many days in the year when the church forbade the eating of meat.
This is from The Forme of Cury, c1390, a cookbook compiled around 1390 by the master-cooks of King Richard II:
Tart in ymber day: take and parboile onynons; presse out the water & hewe hem smale; take brede & bray it in a mortar, and temper it up with ayren; do perto butter, ineon, spice and salt and corans & a ltel sugar with powdor douce, and bake it in a trap,& serve it forth.
Which when translated means: Take and parboil onions; press out the water and chop them small; take bread and grind it in a mortar, and mix it with eggs; add butter to this, and saffron, salt, currents and a little sugar with sweet powder; bake it in a pie shell (or oven dish) and serve it forth.
Bread Pudding
Puddings also use up stale bread e.g. summer pudding or the traditional bread pudding.
This recipe uses breadcrumbs and is from The House-keeper’s Pocket-book, and Compleat Family Cook, by Mrs Sarah Harrison, 6th edition, 1755.
To a pint of Cream put in a Quarter of a Pound of Butter, set it on the Fire, and keep it stirring; the Butter being melted, put in as much grated Manchet as will make it pretty light, a Nutmeg, or something else, and as much Sugar as you please, three or four Eggs, and a little Salt; mix all well together, butter a dish, put it in, and bake it half an Hour.
Toast sandwiches
And finally, here is an example of toast being used to feed invalids, in the belief it was easier on the stomach than freshly-baked bread.
This recipe is from Housekeeping Book, Edited by Mary Jewry, c.1890.
Ingredients: Thin cold toast, thin slices of bread and butter, pepper and salt to taste. Mode: Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt. This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.