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Irish Rolls
Put a tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda to two pounds of flour, sweetened with about two tea-spoonfuls of finely-powdered sugar. Beat the whites of a couple of eggs to a froth, and make a dough with them, adding as much good butter-milk as will make an ordinary paste. Shape into cakes or rolls at once, and bake from fifteen to twenty minutes, according to size. Sour milk may be used, but buttermilk will make the rolls richer. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A soda bread dough in roll form, from the era when buttermilk was the by-product of home churning and every kitchen had some. The recipe assumes you know what a soda dough wants, so the two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and the liquid quantity.
- Work fast, bake at onceThe carbonate of soda begins reacting with the buttermilk the moment they meet, and the lift is chemical rather than yeast-driven. Mix, shape and get the rolls into the oven without resting the dough, exactly as the recipe insists.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Soda rolls of this size are usually baked hot, in the region of 425-450F, which is consistent with the fifteen to twenty minutes stated. A cooler oven risks pale, heavy rolls.
- Two pounds of flourThat is roughly 7 to 7 1/2 cups of plain flour, a large batch by modern standards. Halving it is sensible unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Buttermilk quantityThe original says only "as much as will make an ordinary paste," which is genuinely open. Expect somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups for the full 2 lb of flour, added gradually until the dough is soft but not sticky; flour absorbency varies too much to fix a number.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is plain bicarbonate of soda, what a modern box calls baking soda. Half a teaspoon to 2 lb of flour is a light hand; the acid in the buttermilk is what activates it, so do not substitute sweet milk.
- Sour milk todayThe suggested substitute assumed raw milk that soured cleanly. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use cultured buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup.
- Egg whitesTwo whites beaten to a froth lighten the crumb slightly; the yolks are not used, so keep them for something else. Fold them in rather than beating them down.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly 16 to 20 rolls. They are best within hours of baking, as all soda breads stale quickly.
Soda-raised bread belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century, when bicarbonate of soda became cheap and widely available and cooks discovered it would raise a loaf in minutes with nothing but sour milk to set it going. In Ireland it took hold with unusual force, partly because of what is often said to have been the soft local wheat's poor showing as yeast bread and partly because buttermilk was the everyday leftover of butter-making in farm kitchens. Cassell's is a London household compendium aiming at breadth, and the note on cost -- a penny each -- tells you what it was for: a cheap, quick bread that needed no proving, no yeast and no baker. The formula given here, with its sugar and egg whites, is a slightly genteel version of what would have been made plainly at home with flour, soda, salt and buttermilk alone.