Salad Rolls
1½ cups flour. 1/8 cup melted Cottolene. 2 eggs well beaten. 1 compressed yeast cake dis- 3/4 teaspoon grated lemon rind. solved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water.
Flour.
PROCESS: Put sugar and salt in mixing bowl, pour on scalded milk. When lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake and one and onehalf cups flour, beat thoroughly; cover and let rise; when light add melted Cottolene, well beaten eggs, grated lemon rind and just enough flour to knead. Cover and set to rise again; when light turn on a floured board, knead slightly; roll to one-half inch thickness, shape with very small biscuit cutter, then roll each biscuit in the shape of a finger roll. Place on a buttered sheet an inch and one-half apart; set to rise, and bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Five minutes before removing from oven, brush over tops with white of one egg slightly beaten, diluted with one tablespoon milk. 2 cups scalded milk.
A sweet yeast-raised finger roll, enriched with egg and scented with lemon. The dough is a straightforward sponge-and-dough method, but several of the ingredients are period-specific.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold from the 1890s and long gone from shops. Melted butter or a neutral solid shortening in the same amount does the same job; butter will give the better flavour with the lemon.
- Compressed yeast cakeOne cake is roughly 0.6 oz fresh yeast, equivalent to about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast. Dissolve dry yeast in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as written and give it ten minutes to foam.
- Scalded milkScalding is usually explained as deactivating something in raw milk that weakens gluten, and with raw milk it also served safety. With pasteurised milk it is unnecessary, though heating and cooling to lukewarm still speeds the sponge along.
- A hot ovenRead this as 400-425F. Small enriched rolls of this size will be done in 12-15 minutes; the egg wash goes on at about the ten-minute mark, as directed, or it will scorch.
- Sugar and saltThe quantities are not legible in the ingredient column. For two cups of milk and a soft sweet roll, a competent baker would work from about 1/3 cup sugar and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- Total flourOnly the sponge flour is specified with certainty; the rest is added "just enough to knead." Expect somewhere near 6 cups all told for two cups of milk, added gradually until the dough is soft but no longer sticky.
- ShapingCutting rounds with a small cutter and then rolling each into a finger is the period way of getting uniform rolls. Simply dividing the dough into equal pieces by weight, about 1 1/2 oz each, is faster and more even.
- YieldTwo cups of milk makes a large batch, roughly three dozen small rolls. Rolls of this kind stale quickly; freeze what is not eaten the first day.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the makers of Cottolene, and the shortening's recurrence throughout the book is the reason it exists: it belongs to the great wave of turn-of-the-century promotional cookbooks in which a manufacturer paid for the recipes so the product would be named in them. Cottolene, which appeared around 1890, was marketed hard as a cleaner and more economical substitute for lard, and its makers leaned on both frugality and gentility to sell it. The rolls themselves are conventional for the period, a lemon-scented milk bread of the sort likely passed at Sunday dinner with the salad course, which would account for the name.