Lunch Rolls
1 yeast cake 1 1/4 cupfuls milk 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 cupfuls flour 1 egg 1 teaspoonful salt Scald and cool the milk, then add yeast and sugar. Now add risky and 2 cupfuls flour. Beat thoroughly, then add egg well beaten, remainder of flour and salt. Mix and turn out on floured board and knead lightly and thoroughly, using as little flour as possible. Place in greased bowl, cover and set aside in warm place to rise two hours. When light, form into small rounds, place one inch apart on greased pan. Allow to rise half an hour. Brush over with Crisco and bake in hot oven fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for twenty rolls.
A straightforward enriched dinner roll from one of the Crisco-sponsored recipe books, where the shortening is the point. A few things need translating.
- "Add risky" is a typoThe line should read "add Crisco" — the 2 tablespoons of shortening go in with the scalded, cooled milk, yeast and sugar before the first 2 cups of flour. Nothing called "risky" was ever an ingredient.
- One yeast cakeA yeast cake of this era is a cake of compressed fresh yeast, commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes were not standardised. As a working substitution, use one 1/4-oz packet (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast.
- Scald and coolScalding is usually explained as inactivating something in raw milk that weakens gluten, and it also dealt with the raw milk itself; with pasteurised milk it is generally treated as unnecessary. Warm the milk to roughly 110F so it does not kill the yeast, and no hotter.
- "Hot oven"Read this as a hot oven, roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes suits small rolls; they should sound hollow and read near 190F inside.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco, introduced in 1911, was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; today's version is reformulated and lower in trans fat, and behaves broadly similarly in dough. Butter or lard works, with a slight change in flavour and a softer crumb.
- Rising timesTwo hours for the first rise assumes a cool kitchen and a slower yeast. In a modern 70F room with commercial yeast, judge by volume — doubled is done, usually 60 to 90 minutes — and let the shaped rolls go until visibly puffed rather than watching the clock.
- FlourFour cups of soft turn-of-the-century flour absorbs less liquid than modern bread flour. Start with 3 1/2 cups all-purpose and add the rest only as needed; the instruction to use as little flour as possible is the one to follow.
- YieldTwenty rolls, baked an inch apart so they brown on all sides rather than knitting together into a pan loaf.
This comes from the wave of cookbooks published to promote Crisco after its 1911 introduction, when Procter & Gamble needed to teach American cooks what to do with a solid vegetable fat that was neither butter nor lard. The recipes are conventional household fare, but the shortening is named as a branded product, and often used twice in one recipe, as here, before baking. The rolls themselves are the standard American enriched "lunch roll" or dinner roll of the period, milk-and-egg dough shaped small and served hot, a fixture of the years before instant yeast and refrigerated dough shortened the timetable.