Prepare the dough as for bread. Work in ¼ pound of butter and ¼ pound of sugar. Add 4 beaten eggs; form into rolls; put in a well-buttered baking-pan; let them raise half an hour. Brush the tops with beaten egg and let bake until done.
This is a sketch rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a bread dough going and tells you only what to add to it. A few numbers need filling in.
- The missing base"Prepare the dough as for bread" means a plain yeast dough of flour, water or milk, salt and yeast. The book gives no quantity; the enrichments here would suit something in the region of 2 lb (about 7 cups) of flour, though the text does not say so. With much less flour the dough will be noticeably slack.
- Quarter pound eachA quarter pound of butter is 1 stick, 4 oz, 113 g. A quarter pound of sugar is a generous ½ cup. Together with 4 eggs this makes a lightly enriched, sweetened dough — richer than plain bread, but well short of brioche.
- Work the butter in lateAdd the butter and eggs after the flour and liquid have come together and the gluten has begun to develop, a little at a time. Fat added at the start coats the flour and gives a slack dough that never builds structure.
- Half an hour is optimisticEnriched, sugared doughs rise slowly. Expect the shaped rolls to need 45 to 90 minutes in a warm kitchen to become visibly puffed and slow to spring back when pressed. The half hour in the text presumes a warmer kitchen and a livelier leaven than most modern ones.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. A moderate oven of about 375°F suits rolls this rich; the sugar and egg wash brown fast, so watch from 15 minutes and expect 18 to 22 minutes for small rolls, longer for larger ones.
- Egg washBrush thinly and avoid letting it pool in the seams, where it sets into a rubbery seal that stops the roll expanding. A pinch of salt beaten into the egg loosens it enough to spread evenly.
- Doneness"Until done" means an internal temperature of about 190°F, or a hollow sound when the base is tapped. Colour alone is unreliable here, since the sugar browns before the crumb is set.
- YieldWith something like 2 lb of flour, expect roughly 18 to 20 sizeable dinner rolls, or nearer 30 if you shape them at the 2 oz suggested above. They are best the day they are baked, or refreshed briefly in a hot oven.
"French roll" in English and American cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rarely meant anything as lean as a baguette; it tended to mean a soft, enriched, egg-and-butter roll, baked small and served at breakfast or with tea. The name arguably signalled refinement more than geography, in the same way that "French" attached itself to everything from beans to polish. This particular recipe begins by referring back to the household's ordinary bread dough, building a fancy bread by enriching a portion of it rather than starting fresh — though many printed recipes for French rolls give the full ingredient list instead. The book's format, one dish a day for a year with each attributed to a nation, belongs to a vogue for cosmopolitan variety in domestic publishing around the turn of the twentieth century.