Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › French Rolls
French Rolls
Peel six medium-sized mealy potatoes, boil in two quarts of water, press and drain both potatoes and water through a colander; when cool enough so as not to scald, add flour to make a thick batter, beat well, and when lukewarm, add one-half cup potato yeast. Make this sponge early in the morning, and when light turn into a bread pan, add a tea-spoon salt, half cup lard, and flour enough for a soft dough; mix up, and set in a warm, even temperature; when risen, knead down and place again to rise, repeating this process five or six times; cut in small pieces and mold on the bread-board in rolls about one inch thick by five long; roll in melted butter or sweet lard, and place in well-greased baking pans (nine inches long by five wide and two and a half in depth, makes a convenient-sized pan, which holds fifteen of these rolls; or, if twice the width, put in two rows); press the rolls closely together, so that they will only be about half an inch in width. Let rise a short time and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven; if the top browns too rapidly, cover with paper. These rolls, if properly made, are very white, light and tender.
Or, make rolls larger, and just before putting them in the oven, cut deeply across each one with a sharp knife. This will make the cleft roll, so famous among French cooks. - Mrs. J. W. Robinson, Marysville, Ohio.
A potato-water sponge dough, built over a full day. The method is sound; only the leavening and the oven language need translating.
- Potato yeastThe half cup of "potato yeast" is a home-kept liquid starter, sluggish and mildly sour. One packet of active dry yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) proofed in a little of the warm potato water stands in for it, though the sponge will be ready in 1-2 hours rather than a whole morning.
- Temperature of the potato water"Cool enough so as not to scald" and "when lukewarm" are both about yeast survival: keep the liquid under 110F before the yeast goes in. Flour beaten into water that is still near boiling will also gelatinize and give a gluey sponge.
- Quantities are open-endedNo flour amount is given anywhere, and no total volume can be worked out from the text: six potatoes pressed through a colander with their cooking water make a large quantity of liquid and puree, and the flour is whatever it takes. Work by feel to a soft, slightly tacky dough.
- The five or six knock-downsThis is the hinge. Repeated deflation is what produces the very white, fine, tender crumb the recipe promises; it degasses the dough and keeps the cell structure small. Skip it and you get an ordinary coarse-crumbed potato roll. Allow most of a day, or refrigerate between rises.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat is right for rolls this size; the paper laid over the tops is the period equivalent of tenting with foil.
- Pressing the rolls togetherCrowding them to half an inch wide forces the rise upward and leaves soft torn sides — the same principle as modern pull-apart rolls. Do not space them out.
- Lard and "sweet lard""Sweet" here means fresh and unrancid, not sugared. Half a cup of lard gives a tender, faintly savory crumb; butter or shortening works, with a slightly less delicate result.
- YieldThe recipe says only that a 9x5-inch pan holds fifteen of these rolls, or two rows in a pan of twice the width; it gives no total, and the batch may well fill more than one pan. The dough halves cleanly if that is more bread than you want.
Potatoes entered American bread baking as much for economy as for texture: potato water feeds yeast well, and the starch holds moisture so the loaf stays soft an extra day, which mattered in a house that baked once or twice a week. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox in Minnesota and Ohio in the 1870s and 80s from contributions of named housewives like Mrs. Robinson of Marysville, gives several recipes for potato yeast, since packaged dry yeast was not yet a household staple. The "cleft roll, so famous among French cooks" is plausibly the slashed petit pain of a French bakery, and its appearance here says something about how nineteenth-century American cookbooks used the word French: it signaled refinement and lightness, and attaching it to a good potato roll made a plain breakfast bread worth its place among the bread receipts.