Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Coffee Rolls
Coffee Rolls
Work into a quart of bread dough a rounded table-spoon of butter, and a half tea-cup of white sugar; add some dried currants (well washed and dried in the oven), sift some flour and sugar over them, work into the other ingredients, make into small rolls, dip into melted butter, place in tins, let rise a short time, and bake.
A thrifty second-day recipe: plain bread dough enriched with butter, sugar and currants. Everything hinges on how much you slow the dough down by adding those things.
- A quart of bread doughDough was measured by bulk in these books. A quart is somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 lb of dough, roughly what you get from about 3 cups of flour, though the figure shifts with how far the dough has risen. A batch of ordinary white bread dough will serve.
- Half a tea-cup of sugarA teacup in these books runs smaller than a modern measuring cup, generally counted at about 3/4 cup. Half a teacup is therefore roughly 1/3 cup of sugar.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, a small seedless raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Washing and drying them in the oven was to remove grit and stem fragments; modern packaged currants need only a rinse, or a brief soak in warm water if they are stony, then a thorough pat dry.
- Why the flour and sugar dustingTossing the damp currants in flour and sugar keeps them from clumping and from sliding out of the dough as you knead. Do not skip it if the fruit is at all moist.
- Working in the enrichmentButter, sugar and fruit all slacken and weigh down a risen dough. Knead the butter and sugar in first until the dough comes back together and stops feeling greasy, then fold the fruit in with as few strokes as possible so it does not smear and streak.
- "Let rise a short time"Sweetened, fat-laden dough that has already had one rise moves faster than you expect. Thirty to forty minutes at room temperature, until the rolls look puffed and a pressed fingertip leaves a slow-filling dent, is usually enough.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Small enriched rolls with sugar and dried fruit want a moderate oven, about 375F, for 15 to 20 minutes; hotter than that and the sugar and exposed currants scorch before the centres set.
- The butter dipDipping each roll in melted butter before panning helps them separate cleanly and gives soft sides.
- YieldAbout a dozen to sixteen rolls of breakfast size. They are best the day they are baked.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by practical housekeepers, and this recipe shows the compiler's habit of building one dish out of another: bread dough was made in quantity on baking day, and a quart of it diverted into sweet rolls cost the cook almost no extra labour. The name is usually taken to mean simply rolls to be eaten with coffee, and such rolls are often said to be an American counterpart of the German Kaffeekuchen; a number of nineteenth-century "coffee cakes" and "coffee rolls" appear, like this one, to be ordinary yeast dough enriched after the fact rather than a separate formula. Dried currants were the standard baking fruit of the period, imported cheaply from Greece, which is why the recipe insists on washing them before use.