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Cream Fruit Rolls
2 cups pastry flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1 tablespoon Cottolene. 1 cup cream.
Dates.
PROCESS: Sift together flour, salt and baking powder; add shortening and rub in with tips of fingers. Add cream, mix with knife to a soft dough. Turn on a lightly floured board; pat and roll to one-third inch thickness. Cut with biscuit cutter, place one-half of a stoned date on half of biscuit, brush edges with milk and fold as Parker House Rolls. Press edges together, brush top of rolls with milk and place one-half date on top of each. Bake on a buttered sheet in a hot oven fifteen minutes.
A quick biscuit dough enriched with cream and folded around dates — closer to a scone than a yeast roll, despite the name. Two ingredients need translating before you start.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which published this book. Any solid vegetable shortening works; a tablespoon of butter is better tasting and the difference at this quantity is small.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute by replacing about a tablespoon of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch (the two-tablespoon swap gives something closer to cake flour), or simply use all-purpose and handle the dough as little as possible.
- The baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by current standards. Period baking powders were less reliable and often single-acting; two and a half teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives the same lift without a metallic aftertaste.
- CreamThe only liquid in the dough and most of the fat here. Period "cream" was often lighter than modern heavy cream, so anything from light cream upward will do; half-and-half will work but the rolls will be drier and paler.
- A hot oven425–450°F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for a third-inch round; check at twelve, as the exposed date on top scorches before the dough is done.
- Stoned datesPitted dates. Medjools are much larger and moister than the pressed dates of 1913 — a half Medjool per roll is generous, and a quarter may suit better.
- Folding as Parker House RollsPress the round off-centre with the back of a knife, then fold the larger half over the smaller so the top overhangs. The seal is what keeps the date from working out in the oven.
- YieldRoughly a dozen and a half rolls from a two-and-a-half-inch cutter, depending on how much you re-roll. Best eaten the day they are baked; they stale quickly.
52 Sunday Dinners was issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company as advertising for Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil shortening, which is why that brand name appears in place of lard or butter in the book's recipes. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton industry that food manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century turning into a kitchen staple, and cookbooks given away free were one vehicle for persuading housewives to use it. The roll itself is a baking-powder biscuit dressed up for company: dates were an inexpensive imported sweet, widely available in American groceries by 1900, and folding them into a plain dough turned an everyday quick bread into something fit for company. The Parker House fold takes its name from the Boston hotel, where the buttered, folded roll is generally traced to the 1870s.