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Breakfast Biscuit
Take a piece of risen bread dough, and work into it one beaten egg and a teaspoonful of butter; when all is thoroughly worked together, flour your hands and make it into balls the size of an egg; rub a tin over with cream, put in the biscuits and set in a quick oven for twenty minutes, and serve hot for breakfast. When eaten, break them open-to cut would make them heavy.
A thrifty way of turning a handful of yesterday's bread dough into breakfast rolls. The whole method rests on getting the enriching worked in without knocking all the life out of the dough.
- How much doughThe original assumes a bread day already in progress and gives no quantity. A piece of about 1 lb of risen dough will take one egg and a teaspoon of butter, and would divide into eight or nine egg-sized rolls.
- Working in the eggEgg and softened butter make a slack, sticky mess at first; keep kneading and the dough comes back together in two or three minutes. Adding a little flour to the bench rather than to the dough keeps the crumb light.
- "A quick oven"Usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits egg-sized rolls; by modern practice they should sound hollow and read about 200F inside.
- Rub a tin over with creamThis is greasing the pan, not glazing the tops. Butter or oil does the same job; cream was simply what stood on the dairy shelf.
- Second riseThe recipe gives none, taking the dough straight from shaping to the oven. Modern bakers may prefer to let the shaped balls rest covered in the tin for a time before baking, since the dough has been worked hard with egg and butter.
- Break, do not cutSound advice for any hot roll. A knife compresses a crumb that is still setting with steam; tearing leaves the open structure intact.
- Yield and servingEight or nine rolls from a pound of dough; best within an hour of leaving the oven. They stale quickly and are worth splitting and toasting the next day.
Recipes like this one belong to a household where bread dough was a standing resource rather than a project. A cook setting sponge for the week's loaves had dough at hand every few days, and the small extras of the table -- breakfast rolls, tea cakes, doughnuts, coffee cake -- could be made by enriching a lump broken off from it with egg, butter, sugar or spice. The advantage was practical: the leavening was already alive and paid for, and no separate rise had to be started from scratch. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print "take a piece of light dough" formulas of this kind, and such recipes are generally thought to have faded as store bread replaced the home baking day, leaving the enriched offshoots to be rebuilt from flour and packaged yeast instead.