[Sca-cooks] Grating bread - experimental archaeology

[edoard at medievalcookery.com]

So the question was asked if had I ever tried to grate fresh bread, and
I realized that the answer was no, and that it was unacceptable.

I know that they had graters that were similar enough to modern ones -
there's a beautiful example of one in Vincenzo Campi's "Kitchen" (see
URL) where it's apparently being used to grate bread.

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/campi/vincenzo/2kitchen.html

The question then is just how effective is this on fresh bread?

So I stopped on the way home and picked up a pack of sandwich rolls. 
When I bake bread, I use a fairly simple recipe (flour, water, yeast,
fat, salt, sugar) and get a reasonably firm bread.  The rolls I bought
aren't quite as firm, being somewhere between my bread and Wonder in
terms of smushyness.  Fine, if I can grate them when they're fresh then
I figure something less doughy will work equally well or better.

I got out the cheese grater and used the side for turning hard cheese
into fine crumbs, and after a rather tedious few minutes I had a bowl
full of very fine bread crumbs.  There were some larger bits in there
that came about mostly near the end of the process, when the piece of
roll I was holding was too thing to grate properly and would tend to
roll up, but they were easily picked out.  I believe at least one of the
gingerbread recipes says to sift the crumbs after grating.

The final product was indistinguishable from what I get by putting fresh
bread in a food processor.  The grating process is simply more physical
work and wastes a bit of bread.

So I'm inclined to believe that in period they used reasonably fresh
bread for the following reasons:

1.  It is possible to grate fresh bread.

2.  None of the recipes I have seen instruct the cook to use stale or
dry bread or to dry the bread before use.  I have seen recipes for foods
other than gingerbread that do specify old or dry bread, so I'd expect
them to say so in the gingerbread recipes if it was meant to be so.

3.  Using dried bread crumbs gives the gingerbread an unpleasant (to
me), gritty texture, which requires an additional (and somewhat
ineffective) step of letting the gingerbread rest to soften the crumbs -
with this additional step also notably absent in the period recipes I've
seen.

Your mileage may vary,

- Doc