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Milk Rolls
To eight ounces of dry flour mix a little salt, and two ounces or less of butter; add half an ounces of German yeast, and an egg beaten with a small cup of milk, which should be warm, but not hot. When mixed to a firm dough, cover it up well in the same pan to rise, in a warm place, and when risen make into rolls and bake quickly. The rolls may be brushed over with egg before they are put on the baking-tin. Time, a quarter of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for six rolls.
A plain enriched roll dough, given in the compressed style of a Victorian dictionary entry, where rising times and oven heats were assumed knowledge. The gaps are easy to fill.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in blocks. Half an ounce is about 14 g; substitute roughly 1½ teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or 2 teaspoons of active dry.
- "Dry flour"Eight ounces is about 1¾ cups of plain flour. "Dry" here most likely means flour that is not damp; Victorian bread instructions elsewhere do sometimes call for flour to be aired or warmed before yeast work, but this recipe does not.
- The milk is the hinge"Warm, but not hot" means blood heat, about 98 to 100F (37 to 38C). Milk that feels distinctly hot on the wrist will weaken fresh yeast; milk approaching scalding will kill it and the rolls will not rise.
- A small cupGenuinely ambiguous — a small cup may be 4 to 5 fl oz, but with the egg as well that is more liquid than a firm dough will take. Hold back some of the liquid and add it only if the flour will not come together.
- Rising timeThe recipe gives none. In a warm kitchen expect 1 to 1½ hours for the first rise until roughly doubled, and 20 to 30 minutes for the shaped rolls before they go in.
- "Bake quickly"The book says only to bake quickly, not "quick oven"; take that as a hot oven, roughly 400 to 450F (200 to 230C). Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for six small rolls; they should sound hollow and be well coloured.
- Egg washThe recipe brushes the rolls before they go on the tin; if the glaze smears as you move them, brush them once they are on the tin instead. A little milk beaten into the egg gives a softer shine.
- YieldSix rolls, as stated — each around 70 to 80 g of dough. They are best the day they are baked; enriched rolls of this size stale quickly.
Milk rolls belong to the large family of breakfast and tea breads that filled British cookery books once compressed yeast became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century. "German yeast" was the ordinary trade description for the pressed cake yeast imported from, and later modelled on, Continental distillery and brewery practice; before it, a cook depended on brewer's barm or a homemade leaven of uncertain strength, and small enriched doughs like this were correspondingly harder to time. The recipe demonstrates a method — a firm, egg-and-butter dough proved once and baked hot — that the reader was then expected to vary. The "probable cost, 6d" is characteristic of the house style: Cassell's addressed households running on a fixed weekly allowance, and priced almost everything it printed.