Home › The Principles of Cookery › Parker House Rolls
Parker House Rolls
When making bread, set aside sufficient dough to make one dozen rolls. Work into it one large table-spoonful of lard or butter. Let this stand for four hours, then knead again and allow it to stand for three hours longer. Roll out, and cut into round cakes almost as large as a saucer. Fold them over, and leave them for one hour. Brush over with warm butter, and bake for half an hour.
A shortcut recipe that assumes you already have bread dough rising on the counter; the instructions are for enriching and shaping it rather than mixing from scratch. Two things need adjusting: the resting times suit a cold kitchen, and the baking time is far too long for a small roll.
- Start from lean bread doughAny plain white bread dough works — roughly 3 cups flour, 1 cup liquid, 2 teaspoons salt and a packet of yeast will give a dozen rolls. Take it after the first mix, before its final rise.
- "One large table-spoonful" of fatPeriod tablespoons were not standardised and often ran a little larger than the modern 15 ml, and the recipe says "large" anyway; a generous tablespoon to 1½ tablespoons of soft butter is a fair reading, worked in until the dough stops looking streaked. Lard gives a tenderer, slightly flatter roll; butter gives flavour.
- The seven hours of restingFour hours plus three is very long by modern standards, and may reflect a cooler kitchen than most of us have; in a 70F room the dough will be over-proofed well before then. Roughly one hour after working in the butter and 45 minutes after the second knead works instead — go by doubled volume, not the clock.
- The fold is the whole pointThe fold -- Roll to about ¼ inch and cut 3-inch rounds, then fold each over. The familiar modern handling presses an off-centre crease with the back of a knife and butters that crease before folding, so the baked roll opens along a seam; note that this recipe brushes butter only afterwards, over the folded cakes.
- "Almost as large as a saucer"Saucer sizes varied, but a tea saucer of the period was in the region of 4½ to 5 inches. Cut that large only if you want substantial dinner rolls; 3 inches gives a more familiar size.
- Oven and timeBake at 400F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold. The recipe gives no oven temperature; half an hour at a modern setting will dry these out completely.
- Butter twiceThe recipe brushes with warm butter before baking, which browns the tops. Brush again the moment they come out for the glossy finish associated with the name.
- YieldOne dozen rolls, as stated — enough for four to six at dinner. They stale fast; serve the day they are baked or reheat briefly, covered.
The roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, opened by Harvey Parker in 1855, whose dining room made the folded, butter-creased roll famous enough that the shape was being copied and printed in cookbooks under that name by the 1870s and 1880s. The story that it was invented by an angry baker who flung unfinished dough into the oven is repeated everywhere but is traditional rather than documented. What is telling here is how Cassell's presents it: not as a hotel specialty to be admired but as a thrifty use for dough already made, a dozen rolls pinched from the week's bread. That is the logic of a nineteenth-century household kitchen, where the bread sponge was the day's central project and everything else — rolls, buns, a pan of dough cakes — was worked out of the same batch.