Have bread; breadcrumbs are inevitable. You would think then, with boundless English-speaking cultures using bread, there would be endless words for breadcrumbs. Terms that are mere descriptors for the bread pieces, like “fine,” “medium” and “large.” Would that we have 50 words to express a range of kinds of breadcrumbs, in the way Tamil has more than four dozen words for love.
In “All That Crumbs Allow,” authors Michelle Marek and Camilla Wynne creep toward that goal. Across 45 recipes — each its own kind of breadcrumb-naming treatise — the duo proclaims how versatile the kitchen staple both is and can be.
A prayer to pulverization
There is much bread-on-bread action in this text. Marek and Wynne, who both have backgrounds in pastry, cannot help themselves. Wynne, in a recipe for bread and jam twice-baked croissants, eschews the nut filling and crafts a breadcrumb frangipane, which is then slathered on bisected day-old croissants along with the jam of your choosing and baked until crackly.
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Marek reminisces about the sweet cheese dumplings of her childhood visits to the Czech Republic. Soft bread cubes are beaten with butter, sugar, flour, egg and farmers cheese before a poaching turn in sweetened boiling water. The pillowy dumplings are then added to hot crisped breadcrumbs and served with roasted or fresh fruit.
Other recipes for sweets include such zingers as breadcrumb-glazed doughnuts, rhubarb cardamom breadcrumb cake and witches’ froth, a fluffy cloud of whipped apple served with clattering toasted breadcrumbs.
Savory-heads, fret not: Marek and Wynne have not abandoned you. A three-page blueprint for schnitzel ensures the finest you might ever cook. Roasted potatoes are shellacked with buttery crumbs. From the annals of cooking past, sauce jouvert, spunky with marjoram, red wine vinegar, both walnuts and hazelnuts, and breadcrumbs, is raised from the annals of recipe history to be draped over pretty much any kind of vegetable.
In the beginning, there was bread
The book’s centerpiece chapters on starters, mains and sweets are bookended on one side by a treatise on how to make and store breadcrumbs of various sizes, with an under-duress sub-section about how to buy breadcrumbs. “There is, it must be said, something perverse about paying for breadcrumbs,” Marek and Wynne write. “Buying breadcrumbs is one of life’s cosmic jokes, and it makes us laugh every time.”
A pantry chapter closes “All That Crumbs Allow.” It is a terse collection of six recipes that swerves from the book’s much-used, dead-simple Crunchy Topping to Fairy Rocks, with their sparkling blend of freeze-dried raspberries, sesame seeds, ground rose petals, sugar and, yes, breadcrumbs.
The book’s coda is a collection of exciting recipes from pals. In Marek and Wynne’s world, breadcrumbs are not for gatekeeping. They are meant to be spread wide and far. You can almost hear the authors chattering, “May you forever follow a trail of gluten nubbins to immeasurable deliciousness.”
