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Breakfast Cakes or Rolls
Take one pound of fine flour, and make it into a dough with an ounce of butter which has been warmed, a little salt, half a pint of milk, and half an ounce of good fresh German yeast dissolved in warm water; cover it well up, and leave it all night by the side of the fire. In the morning make up into rolls, and if they stand for half an hour before baking they will be all the better. Seven or eight rolls may be made with this quantity of dough. Time for baking, from fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 7d.
A plain overnight yeast dough with a small amount of butter and milk. The quantities are workable as written; the main gaps are oven temperature and the state of the yeast.
- German yeastThis means fresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in Victorian Britain as an alternative to the ale barm from brewers. Half an ounce is about 14 g fresh; roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or 2 teaspoons of active dry, will stand in.
- Weights and volumesOne pound of flour is about 450 g, or 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups. Half an imperial pint of milk is 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. An ounce of butter is 28 g.
- "A little salt"Genuinely unspecified. For a pound of flour, 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of fine salt is the usual modern proportion; less and the rolls taste flat.
- Overnight by the fireA banked kitchen fire gave a gentle warmth, not heat, and the dough rose slowly over eight to ten hours. A room at 65-68F does the same job. Do not put the bowl anywhere genuinely warm or the dough will overproof and collapse before morning.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, since the cook would have judged the bread oven. Fifteen to twenty minutes for a small roll implies a hot oven; somewhere around 425F is a reasonable modern equivalent. The rolls should sound hollow when tapped underneath.
- The second riseThe recipe treats the half hour after shaping as optional but better; in practice it is worth doing, since dough that goes straight from shaping into the oven tends to bake dense and tight.
- Yield and costSeven or eight rolls, as stated. The sevenpence is old pence, pre-decimal.
Cassell's places this among its basic breakfast breads, at a moment when British domestic baking was shifting from brewer's barm to purchased compressed yeast. "German yeast" was the common name for that compressed product, some of it imported from Continental yeast works before British manufacture expanded in the later nineteenth century; it was reckoned more reliable and less sour than barm, and cookery writers of the period regularly specify it by that name. The overnight rise by the fire suggests a household where the kitchen stayed warm through the night, and a morning routine in which someone was up early enough to shape, prove and bake before breakfast was served. The rolls themselves are the plainest sort of enriched bread, an ounce of butter to a pound of flour being just enough to soften the crumb without turning it into anything that would be called a bun.