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Rolls, Cream of Tartar
Mix a tea-spoonful of cream of tartar and half a tea-spoonful of soda with a pint of fine flour. Add as much milk only as will make the dough firm enough to be rolled out, and handle it as lightly as possible. Roll it out on a well-floured board, and stamp it in rounds an inch thick. Bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, ten to fifteen minutes.
This is a chemically leavened soft roll — in modern terms, a plain scone or biscuit dough. The whole thing hangs on speed: the acid and alkali start reacting the moment the milk goes in.
- Get it into the oven fastCream of tartar and soda are single-acting; the gas is largely spent within a few minutes of wetting. Mix, roll, cut and bake without pausing, and heat the oven before you start mixing.
- A pint of flourCassell's is a British book, so this is most likely the imperial pint (20 fl oz, about 568 ml), which holds roughly 10 oz (280 g) of flour; on a US pint (2 cups) it would be nearer 8-9 oz (225-250 g). Either way the flour is being measured by volume rather than weighed.
- The milkNo quantity is given; the recipe's own test is 'as much milk only as will make the dough firm enough to be rolled out'. As a starting point, something in the region of 3/4 cup (about 180 ml) per 2 cups of flour, added a little at a time until the dough just coheres. It should be soft but not sticky.
- Quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'quick' is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F (220-230C). The heat needs to be brisk to set the rolls before the gas escapes; a slack oven gives flat results.
- No fat, no sugarUnlike a modern scone, there is neither butter nor sugar here. These are plain rolls; chemically leavened breads of this kind are best eaten fresh and stale quickly.
- "An inch thick"That is the thickness of the cut round, not its width. Cut with a floured plain cutter about 2 inches across and press straight down without twisting, which seals the edge and stops the rise.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 rolls from a pint of flour.
Before packaged baking powder became cheap and reliable, cooks bought the two halves of it separately: bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, the latter a potassium acid tartrate deposited as a crust in wine casks. Combining them in the flour and wetting the mixture gives an immediate release of carbon dioxide, which is why nineteenth-century recipes of this type insist on light handling and a hot oven. The same principle underlies Irish soda bread and the American baking-powder biscuit.