Home › The Principles of Cookery › ROLLS, FRENCH (another way)
ROLLS, FRENCH (another way)
Dr. Kitchener gives the following as the bakers' method of making French rolls in his day. Put a peck of flour into the kneading-trough, and sift it through the brass wire sieve; then rub in three-quarters of a pound of butter, and when it is intimately blended with the flour, mix up with it two quarts of warm milk, a quarter of a pound of salt, and a pint of yeast. Let these ingredients be mixed with the flour and a sufficient quantity of warm water to knead it into a dough; let it stand two hours to prove, and then be moulded into rolls or bricks, which should be placed on tins and set for an hour in the prover. Place them in a brisk oven for about twenty minutes, and, when drawn, the rolls are to be rasped.
This is a bakery formula scaled for a trough, not a mixing bowl. The proportions are sound and scale down cleanly, but nearly every unit and piece of equipment named here needs translating.
- Divide it by twelveA peck of flour in the bakery trade was reckoned at about 14 lb, so this is a trade-sized batch of dough. A twelfth of the recipe — about 1 lb 2 oz flour, 1 oz butter, 6-7 fl oz milk, a generous teaspoon and a half of salt — is a manageable domestic batch.
- The pint of yeastThis means liquid brewer's barm, a wet living culture skimmed off fermenting ale, not a dry powder. Its strength varied, so the quantity is not directly comparable to modern yeast. For the scaled batch above, about a teaspoon of instant dried yeast gives a comparable rise; anything more and the two-hour bulk ferment will overshoot.
- Salt looks alarming and is notA quarter-pound of salt to 14 lb of flour works out near 1.8 per cent by flour weight, which is squarely within normal bread practice today. Do not reduce it on sight.
- Warm milk and warm waterTwo quarts of milk against a peck of flour already supplies the bulk of the liquid; the unmeasured warm water is added on top to bring the dough together. Add it until the dough is soft but not slack.
- "Two hours to prove"The first two hours is the bulk fermentation, not the final proof. The hour in the "prover" — a warm, humid cabinet — is the second rise. A covered bowl at around 78F stands in for both.
- A brisk ovenTake this as 425–450F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits rolls of two to three ounces; larger "bricks" will want closer to twenty-five.
- RaspingThe finished rolls were scraped with a metal rasp to take the hard outer skin off the crust, leaving a pale, soft surface. It was a characteristic finish of the English "French roll".
William Kitchiner, the London physician and author of The Cook's Oracle (1817), collected trade practice as well as household cookery, and this entry is Cassell's reprinting of what he recorded as the bakers' method of his own day. The "French roll" of Georgian and Victorian England was not a baguette but a small, soft, milk-and-butter enriched roll, distinguished chiefly by the rasping of its crust; the name is often said to have signalled refinement more than any direct French ancestry. The equipment named — the kneading-trough, the brass wire sieve, the prover — belongs to a commercial bakehouse, which is unsurprising in a recipe explicitly given as the bakers' method.