[Sca-cooks] Grating bread was Kitchen Scene by Campi

[Ron Carnegie]

At 01:04 PM 1/2/03 -0600, you wrote:
>How old was the bread, when you grated it?  And how dense was it?
>
>For breadcrumbs these days, I use a food processor and some very dry bread,
>then sift the results to get fine and coarse crumbs.  At the point I use
>bread to make breadcrumbs, it shatters, which works well in a mortar and
>doesn't grate very well.
>
>Bear


     Actually these days I use a food processor as well, but not when I was
working in a historic kitchen!  To answer your questions however.  The
bread I was using tended to be a roll very similiar to the Manchet of the
SCA period.  They probably had an average circumference of 5 or 6
inches.  Their densities varied greatly depending upon their baker, but
they were not generally very light a fluffy.  As far as age, well that
varied to, but they were not in the brittle state you are describing.  More
often than not they were probably only a few days to a week old.  Sometimes
I was forced to use very new ones, as I hadn't noticed that I had no stock
of more aged examples.  Once I grated one that had been baked that very
day!  Now I assure you this is NOT preferable or even really satisfactory,
but it can be done.  You tend to waste a lot of the bread though as it
tears and "balls' up on the top of the grater.  (Chickens liked it though,
as they got the waste).  Eventually I learned when in this predicament that
toasting the rolls, and allowing them to cool would help, causing the roll
to dry and become hard.

       It is funny to me that the idea of the mortar never even occured to
me, and unlike most home kitchens we had a large marble mortar like the one
in the painting that started this converstation.  (The average modern home
mortar would seem awfully small unless you need very little.  I wouldn't
call that a floor mortar by the bye.  She is using it on the floor, I used
mine on the table.  The three foot tall mortar I had for corn I would call
a floor mortar.  My kitchen had three sizes of mortar.  The tall wooden one
for corn, a few small ones for spices, and the large marble one for just
about everything!


I remain,
Ranald de Balinhard,