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Italian Rolls
A pound of bread dough, quarter-pound softened butter; work the butter well into the dough, and roll out about half an inch thick; cut into strips nearly an inch wide and seven or eight inches long; sift over them fine corn meal, place them apart on a buttered pan, and when light bake in a quick oven. - In the Kitchen.
A rich, buttery breadstick made from ordinary bread dough at the second-rising stage. The technique is straightforward; the vagueness is all in the proofing and the oven.
- A pound of bread doughPresumably a piece taken from a batch of plain white bread dough that has already risen once. About 1 lb of any lean white dough works — roughly the amount from 2 cups flour, two-thirds cup water, salt and yeast. It should be fully fermented but not yet shaped.
- Working in the butterFour ounces of soft butter into a pound of dough is a substantial enrichment, and the dough will look broken and greasy before it comes together. Keep kneading; it will smooth out. Chilled or melted butter both fail here — it must be soft enough to smear.
- A quick oven425–450°F. These are thin strips with a high butter content and want fast colour rather than a long bake.
- When lightThe instruction means the shaped strips have visibly puffed and feel airy — roughly 30 to 45 minutes at warm room temperature, longer if the kitchen is cool. Butter slows yeast, so this second rise takes longer than an unenriched dough would.
- Baking timeNone is given. Strips half an inch thick and an inch wide will be done in 10 to 14 minutes at that heat, when the tops are well browned and the undersides sound hollow.
- The cornmealSifted fine cornmeal over the tops gives a gritty crust and keeps the surface from setting too smooth. The recipe specifies fine meal; coarser grinds will simply fall off.
- Spacing"Place them apart" matters — these expand sideways as well as up, and touching strips will steam rather than crisp, which defeats the point of the shape.
- YieldA pound of dough with the butter worked in, rolled to half an inch, gives roughly nine or ten strips of the stated size. Best eaten the day they are made.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in Minneapolis in 1877, developing out of the earlier Ohio-published Buckeye cook book of 1876, and was reissued repeatedly through the 1880s; it was assembled from contributed recipes, and the credit line "In the Kitchen" most likely refers to a cookbook of that title rather than to a person, the compilers having acknowledged their sources in shorthand. The name "Italian" here may signal shape rather than origin: long thin sticks of dough, dusted and baked hard, of the general type of the grissini associated with Turin. The recipe reflects a common household economy of the period, in which a portion of bread dough was set aside and enriched with butter, sugar or eggs to make rolls, buns or coffee cakes without mixing a separate batch — which is why a number of entries of this kind begin with "a pound of bread dough" rather than a list of flour and yeast.