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Cornmeal Rolls
1 1/4 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 egg 1/2 cupful milk 1 tablespoonful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3/4 cupful cornmeal 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder Sift together flour, cornmeal, salt, baking powder, and sugar. Rub in Crisco with finger tips, then add egg well beaten and milk. Roll out, cut into rounds with a large cutter, brush over with melted Crisco, fold over as for Parkerhouse rolls, brush tops with beaten egg or milk and bake in hot oven ten minutes.
Sufficient for fifteen rolls.
A quick baking-powder dough handled like a biscuit, then folded in the Parker House manner. It comes together in minutes and is best eaten the hour it is baked.
- Hot ovenSet the oven to 425-450F. Ten minutes is right for rolls this size; check at eight, since the egg wash browns before the crumb is quite set.
- CriscoThis is a Procter & Gamble promotional book, so every fat is Crisco. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves identically; butter gives better flavour but a slightly less tender crumb.
- Cornmeal grindUse fine or medium yellow cornmeal. Coarse stone-ground meal will not soften in ten minutes and leaves the rolls gritty. Steel-cut polenta grind is too coarse outright.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients is heavy by current standards; period recipes commonly call for more leavening than we would use now. With modern double-acting powder, one tablespoon is ample and avoids a metallic aftertaste.
- The dough will look dryHalf a cup of milk with one egg is a stiff mixture, closer to biscuit dough than bread dough. Add milk a spoonful at a time if it will not gather; cornmeal absorbs liquid unevenly and flour varies.
- HandlingRub the fat in only until it disappears into coarse crumbs, and roll out once. Rerolling scraps toughens a chemically leavened dough noticeably.
- The foldRoll about half an inch thick, cut with a large round cutter, brush the surface with melted shortening, then crease slightly off-centre with the back of a knife and fold so the top overhangs. The fat film is what lets the halves separate after baking.
- YieldFifteen rolls from a cutter of roughly two and a half to three inches. Serve warm; without yeast they stale within a few hours.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished after 1911, when Procter & Gamble launched Crisco and began commissioning cookbooks in which the new hydrogenated shortening replaced lard and butter in every recipe on the page. That is why a plain cornmeal roll here calls for Crisco twice, once in the dough and again as a brushing fat. The shaping is borrowed from the Parker House roll, generally traced to the Boston hotel of that name in the 1870s, where a folded yeast roll became a dining-room signature and then a national convention; here the fold is applied to a quick baking-powder dough, giving cooks the look of a yeasted supper roll in the time it takes the oven to heat. The cornmeal itself is the older element, a standard American extender and flavouring in breads long before either the hotel or the shortening existed.