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Rolls, Turkish
Take six ounces of Jordan almonds, a pint and a half of milk; two to three pounds of best flour, and half to three-quarters of an ounce of German yeast. Blanch and pound the almonds to a perfectly smooth paste, moisten them gradually with the boiling milk or thin cream, and let them simmer together for a few minutes. Wring--with strong pressure--the milk from the almonds through a tamis or a thick cloth, and employ it like ordinary milk for making the requisite quantity of flour into dough. If liked, the dough may be slightly tinged with saffron, and sweetened with a little pounded sugar.
This is a bread dough enriched with homemade almond milk rather than dairy — the almonds are cooked in milk, then pressed dry and discarded. The original assumes you already know how to make and bake rolls, so the timings and oven heat are missing entirely.
- Jordan almondsIn this period the term means large, plump sweet almonds from Málaga, not the sugar-shelled confection sold under that name now. Use whole blanched sweet almonds; six ounces is about 1 1/4 cups.
- German yeastFresh compressed yeast. Half to three-quarters of an ounce corresponds to roughly 5-7 g of instant dried yeast, or about 1 1/2 to 2 1/4 teaspoons.
- The flour quantity is genuinely openTwo to three pounds of flour against a pint and a half of milk is a wide range, and some of that liquid stays behind in the pressed almonds. Add flour until the dough is soft and slightly tacky rather than weighing to a fixed figure.
- Pounding the almondsA food processor does the work of the mortar, but pulse with a spoonful of the milk to keep the nuts from turning to butter. The paste must be smooth before the boiling milk goes in, or the pressed liquid will be thin and weak.
- TamisA fine drum sieve. A nut-milk bag or a doubled square of muslin is the modern equivalent, and the instruction to wring with strong pressure is the point: hard pressing recovers appreciably more of the almond liquid.
- Saffron and sugarA pinch of saffron steeped in a little of the hot milk is plenty for this quantity. 'A little pounded sugar' is not quantified in the original; perhaps 1-2 oz, enough to season rather than sweeten.
- Proving and bakingThe original gives no timings or oven heat. Knead well, prove until doubled, shape into rolls, prove again until puffy, then bake hot -- around 425F -- for 12 to 15 minutes. Rolls this size are done when they sound hollow and the base is coloured.
- YieldTwo pounds of flour makes roughly twenty to twenty-four small rolls. They are best the day they are baked.
Almond milk was one of the great workhorses of medieval and early modern European cookery, standing in for dairy on fast days and keeping far better than milk in a warm kitchen, and it survived in nineteenth-century cookery books mainly in sweet and enriched baking of this kind. The "Turkish" label in Victorian recipe collections is loose: it generally signals almonds, saffron or rosewater and an air of the eastern Mediterranean rather than any documented Ottoman original. What is telling is the instruction to wring the almonds dry and use only the liquid, the almonds themselves a flavouring agent to be spent and discarded.