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Long Breakfast Rolls
Three and one-half cups sweet milk, one cup butter and lard mixed in equal proportions, one cup potato yeast, flour enough to make into dough. Let rise over night; in the morning add one beaten egg. Knead thoroughly, and let rise again. With the hands, make into balls as large as a small hen's egg; then roll between the hands to make long rolls (about three inches), place close together in even rows in the pans. Let rise until light, and bake delicately.
A large overnight enriched dough of the sort a household baked once or twice a week. The quantities are generous even by period standards, and the only real difficulty is the leavening.
- Potato yeastA cup of homemade potato-water yeast, a liquid starter kept going in the pantry; Buckeye Cookery gives its own recipe for it elsewhere. A cup of it is roughly the strength of a lively liquid sponge, not a packet of dry yeast. Substituting about 2 teaspoons instant yeast slaked in a cup of warm water plus a spoonful of mashed potato will get you close, though the overnight rise makes exact equivalence unimportant.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk called for in soda-raised recipes.
- Butter and lardOne cup total, half of each. All butter works; the lard was there for tenderness and economy. Melt and cool it before mixing so it does not seize the milk.
- Flour enoughExpect somewhere in the region of a dozen cups for this quantity of liquid, added in stages. Stop at a soft, slightly tacky dough rather than a stiff one; the beaten egg is worked in the next morning and will loosen it further.
- The overnight riseThis is the hinge. The dough is mixed and left to rise overnight, with only the beaten egg added in the morning. A cool room, around 65F, gives the best flavour.
- Shaping close togetherRolls placed touching in even rows rise upward instead of outward and stay soft on the sides. Space them a finger's width apart if you want a crustier roll.
- Bake delicatelyThe book gives no temperature. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 375F, for roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are pale gold rather than brown. The instruction seems to be about colour: these were meant to come to the table blond.
- YieldThis is a very large batch, several dozen rolls at the size given. Halving it is straightforward.
Long rolls of this kind were standard breakfast bread in nineteenth-century American households that kept their own yeast, and Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (published in Marysville, Ohio in 1876, with the widely circulated edition following in 1877) devotes a great deal of space to the care and feeding of potato yeast because commercial compressed yeast was still new and not universally trusted. The book was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and its bread chapter reads as an argument for the overnight sponge: set the dough before bed, finish it while the fire is coming up, and have fresh rolls for a breakfast eaten early. The shape itself is hand-rolled to about three inches and baked in touching rows, to be pulled apart at the table.