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Brentford Rolls
Take two pounds of flour, a quarter of a pound of butter, two ounces of powdered sugar, two eggs, a quarter of a pint of yeast, milk enough to form a dough, and salt according to taste. Rub the flour, butter, and sugar together; beat the eggs, and add them to the other ingredients. When light, mould the dough out in rolls, let them rise, and bake on tins in a moderate oven.
A plain enriched bread dough of the sort every Victorian household baked, written for a cook who already knew what dough should feel like. The gaps are all in the quantities the original assumes you can judge by eye.
- The yeast is the real problemA quarter of a pint of yeast means liquid barm or brewer's yeast, a living slurry skimmed from ale, far weaker and wetter than anything sold today. Substitute about 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or one 25 g cake of fresh yeast, and add the missing 5 fl oz as extra milk.
- Two pounds of flourThat is roughly 900 g, about 7 cups of plain flour. Bread flour gives a better roll than modern soft plain flour; Victorian household flour is generally reckoned to have sat somewhere between the two.
- Milk enough to form a doughExpect 450-550 ml (about 2 cups) of lukewarm milk in total for this quantity of flour, including the 5 fl oz added in place of the liquid yeast, and add it gradually. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky rather than firm; enriched doughs stiffen as the butter chills.
- Salt according to tasteUse about 2 teaspoons for 2 lb of flour. Less and the rolls taste flat; much more and the yeast slows noticeably.
- When lightThis is the first rise, not a description of the dough's texture. Let it roughly double, about 1 to 1.5 hours in a warm room, then shape and give the rolls a second rise of 30-45 minutes until puffy and slow to spring back.
- A moderate oven350F/175C. Small enriched rolls need 15-20 minutes; a hair hotter, 375F/190C, gives better colour on a rich dough without drying the crumb.
- Rubbing in butterOnly 4 oz of butter to 2 lb of flour, so this is a lightly enriched dough, closer to a milk roll than a brioche. Rub it in cold as directed rather than melting it, which would slacken the dough.
- YieldThe dough comes to something over 1.5 kg, so roughly 28 to 30 rolls of 2 oz, or 18 to 20 if you make them larger. They stale quickly, as lightly enriched breads do, and are best eaten the day they are baked or split and toasted the next.
Brentford, on the Thames west of London, was a market town and coaching stop where the road out of the city met the river, and its name attached to a roll much as Bath and Chelsea attached themselves to other breads: a local baker's shape or recipe that travelled further than the town's reputation. Victorian cookery compilations gathered numbers of these place-named breakfast breads with little to distinguish them beyond the proportion of butter, egg and sugar, and they tell you more about the Victorian breakfast table than about their supposed birthplaces. The reliance on a quarter-pint of liquid yeast is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply: before compressed and later dried yeast were reliably available in the shops, much domestic leaven came from a brewer or from a home-made ferment, which may be why so many old bread recipes measure yeast by volume rather than weight.