Tea Rolls
(May be completed in Four Hours) 1 Compressed Yeast Cake 1/4 Cupful Tepid Water 3/4 Cupful Milk 1 Tablespoonful Sugar 1½ Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift ¾ Teaspoonful Salt 3 Cupfuls Flour Scald the milk and add the sugar, Snowdrift and salt. Cool it until tepid and then add the yeast, dissolved in the warm water, and beat in half the flour. Continue stirring until it is smooth. If not stiff enough to knead, add a little more flour. Knead until elastic, then set to rise in a bowl oiled with Snowdrift. Cover, and when doubled in bulk, shape as desired. Place an inch apart on a bakingpan, rubbed with Snowdrift, let rise until doubled in bulk, bake in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., about fifteen minutes, then rub over with Snowdrift.
These rolls may be completed in about three hours, by omitting the first rising, shaping the rolls after they have first been kneaded, but the texture is not as fine, nor the flavor so good.
A plain enriched roll dough from a shortening company's promotional cookbook, so the fat is named on every line. The numbers have suffered at the typesetter's hands in two places.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a lard substitute. Any solid vegetable shortening stands in directly; butter works for greasing the bowl, pan and finished tops, with a slight change in flavor and browning.
- The amountsThe printed page gives 1½ tablespoonfuls of Snowdrift and ¾ teaspoonful of salt, as our text now reads. Both are the usual proportions for a dough of this size.
- Compressed yeast cakeA fresh cake of roughly 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast. Dry yeast can go straight into the flour if you prefer, though dissolving it in the quarter cup of tepid water as written does no harm.
- Scalding the milkTraditionally done because something in unscalded milk was held to slacken the dough; pasteurized milk is generally reckoned not to need it, but heating and cooling to tepid is a convenient way to dissolve the sugar, salt and shortening together.
- Temperature checkpointThe milk mixture should be genuinely tepid, not merely off the boil, before the yeast goes in. Around 105-110F is the usual target; well above that, from roughly 130F, the yeast starts to die.
- OvenThe recipe already gives 375F, unusually helpful for its date. Fifteen minutes suits small rolls; larger shapes want twenty to twenty-five, to an internal temperature near 190F.
- YieldThree cups of flour gives about twelve to fifteen rolls of dinner size. Placing them an inch apart produces rolls with crisp separate sides; crowded together they pull apart soft.
- The four-hour claimThe heading's four hours covers the full method; the closing note's three hours is what you get by omitting the first rising. Both assume a warm kitchen. A cool room easily doubles the rising times, and a slow first rise improves flavor, which is exactly the trade-off the last sentence describes.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the various editions of the Snowdrift cook book existed to persuade cooks to reach for it instead of lard or butter. That accounts for the odd insistence here on greasing the bowl, the pan and the baked tops with the product. The recipe itself is a standard American milk-and-shortening roll of the early twentieth century, and its most telling detail is the promise in the title line: compressed baker's yeast, sold fresh by the cake in America from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, made a four-hour roll possible in a home kitchen where an earlier generation would have kept a sourdough or hop yeast going and planned a day ahead. The closing admission, that skipping the first rise saves an hour but costs texture and flavor, is the sort of honesty that these branded cookbooks did not always trouble with.