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Dinner or French Rolls
Make dough as directed in recipe for "Long Breakfast Rolls," make into balls as large as a medium-sized hen's egg, place on a well-floured board, flour a small rolling-pin (three-quarters of an inch in diameter), press down so as nearly to divide each ball of dough in the center, place in baking-pans so as not to touch each other, grease the space made by the rolling pin with melted butter, let rise until light, and bake. These rolls are so small and bake so quickly, that they have the delicious sweet taste of the wheat.. Some grease the hands with butter while making the rolls. Bread dough, by adding the other ingredients, may be used for these rolls..
A shaping method more than a formula: the dough comes from the book's "Long Breakfast Rolls," and everything here is about the crease, the rise and the fast bake. Two points need settling before you start — the dough itself and the oven, neither of which is spelled out on this page.
- The dough is elsewhereThis entry is a cross-reference and cannot be made from the page alone. Any enriched white yeast dough of roughly bread consistency — flour, milk, butter, a little sugar, salt, yeast — behaves as the book intends. The closing line says only that bread dough will serve "by adding the other ingredients"; the page does not list them, so presumably whatever the Long Breakfast Roll dough carries beyond plain bread dough.
- Egg-sized ballsA medium hen's egg of dough is about 2 oz / 55-60 g, so a pound of dough gives roughly eight rolls.
- The rolling-pin creaseThe hinge of the method. A three-quarter-inch dowel pressed almost through the ball, then buttered in the groove, makes the roll open into two lobes as it proves and bakes. Press firmly enough to nearly divide the ball or the crease closes up and you get a plain bun. Any smooth dowel of about that diameter does the job.
- "Let rise until light"Proved until visibly puffed and slow to spring back from a fingertip, roughly 30-45 minutes in a warm kitchen. Underproved rolls seal their crease shut; overproved ones collapse in the groove.
- Oven heatThe page gives no oven instruction beyond "bake." A hot oven, around 425F, is a reasonable modern reading; at that heat rolls this size take about 10-15 minutes. The recipe's own explanation for the sweet taste of the wheat is that they are small and bake quickly.
- Spacing"So as not to touch each other" is deliberate. These are meant to brown on all sides with a crisp shell, unlike pan rolls baked shoulder to shoulder for soft sides. Leave an inch between them.
- Buttering the handsWorth doing. Greased palms let you round a soft enriched dough without adding bench flour, which is what keeps the surface smooth and the crumb tender.
- Yield and servingThe page gives no batch size, so the count depends entirely on how much dough you set. Serve straight from the oven; rolls this small stale within hours.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from Ohio contributors and first issued in the 1870s, is full of these chained entries \— one master dough, half a dozen shapes hung off it \— which is how a working kitchen actually ran when yeast was set the night before and had to earn its keep. "French rolls" in nineteenth-century American books often seem to have meant nothing French in origin; the label is said to have attached itself to small, individually shaped, butter-enriched rolls as a mark of refinement, as against the plain loaf, though the evidence is scattered. Folded and pressed rolls of this kind were being made in domestic kitchens well before the Parker House roll, generally traced to the Boston hotel of that name in the same era, acquired a name. The remark about the "sweet taste of the wheat" is a genuine baker's observation: small rolls in a hot oven set fast, keeping the interior moist and the natural sweetness of the flour forward.