Sift 1½ quarts of flour; add ½ teaspoonful of salt; work in a large tablespoonful of butter; then stir in ½ cup of milk with a piece of yeast dissolved in the milk and a teaspoonful of sugar. Beat all up well with 1 pint of milk; let raise over night. Roll out an inch thick; cut with a biscuit-cutter; rub with melted butter; lay in a buttered baking-pan; let raise one hour; then bake in a hot oven twenty minutes.
A straightforward overnight yeast dough, given in the volume measures of a period when flour was scooped by the quart rather than weighed. The main thing to control is the yeast quantity against that long unrefrigerated rise.
- Flour by volume1½ quarts of flour is 6 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz / 780 g of modern all-purpose. Vienna rolls were traditionally made with a strong, finely milled wheat flour, so bread flour is closer to the original than pastry-soft flour.
- "A piece of yeast"Probably a fragment broken from a compressed cake rather than a whole one. For an overnight room-temperature rise, start with about ½ teaspoon of instant yeast (roughly a quarter of a 0.6 oz fresh cake); much more risks overproofing by morning, leaving the dough slack and sour.
- Total liquid½ cup of milk for the yeast plus 1 pint beaten in afterwards gives 2½ cups against 6 cups of flour, which is very wet by modern standards for a dough meant to be rolled and cut. Hold back a good part of the milk until you see how the flour behaves.
- Overnight riseIf the kitchen is warm, refrigerate the dough overnight instead. A cold rise slows the yeast and keeps the dough from collapsing, though the flavour will not be exactly that of the cool larder the original assumed.
- An inch thickRoll no thinner. These are cut like biscuits and rely on that thickness to spring into a tall roll during the second proof and in the oven.
- Oven temperatureRead "hot oven" as roughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits rolls of this size; check at fifteen, as modern ovens hold heat more evenly than a range oven did.
- Buttering the topsBrushing with melted butter before the second rise keeps a skin from forming and gives a soft, pale-gold crust rather than a crisp one.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 rolls with a 2½-inch cutter. Gather and re-roll the scraps once; a second gathering makes tough rolls.
Vienna's bakers had an outsized reputation through the nineteenth century, and "Vienna" attached to bread the way "French" attached to sauces -- a shorthand for refinement rather than a strict formula. What the name generally signalled was fine white flour, milk and butter in the dough, and a compressed yeast rather than a homemade barm; Vienna-process pressed yeast was much admired and drew international notice around the exhibitions of the 1870s, and its comparative reliability is part of what makes an unattended overnight rise like this one practical. That milk-and-butter enrichment is also why these are rolls rather than bread: a lean dough of the same shape would stale by afternoon. In a book that marches through a year of national dishes a day at a time, Austria gets represented not by a Torte but by the everyday breakfast roll.