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Seed Rolls
Blend one ounce and a half of dried yeast with four ounces of castor sugar, add a gill of tepid water and the same of milk, and mix well. Put one pound and a half of flour in a bowl, rub three ounces of butter in, add a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds, a grating of nutmeg or lemon-peel, and two beaten eggs. Pour the yeast in, and work the whole to a dough with the hand; it should be stiff enough to mould into little rolls without sticking to the hands. Lay them close together on a floured or greased tin; cover with a cloth, and set them in a warm place for an hour. Bake in a hot oven. Probable cost, 1s.
An enriched caraway roll from the era when "dried yeast" meant something quite different from the granules in a modern sachet. Read the yeast quantity carefully before you scale anything.
- The yeast is the hingeAn ounce and a half of yeast to a pound and a half of flour is a very large quantity by modern standards. Period yeasts, whether compressed or the dried barm sold under that name, were less concentrated and less reliable than today's product. With modern active dry or instant yeast, roughly a quarter-ounce (about 2 teaspoons) is the usual amount for this weight of flour.
- GillCassell's is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz (about 150 ml). Two of them, water and milk, give around 300 ml of liquid to 1 1/2 lb (about 5 1/2 cups) of flour, which is on the stiff side, as the recipe intends.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Ordinary granulated works; four ounces (a generous half cup) makes these firmly sweet buns rather than table rolls.
- "Hot oven"425-450F in period terms, but a dough this rich and sugary will colour fast. 400-425F for 12-15 minutes is the practical range, until the tops are deep gold and a roll sounds hollow.
- Blending yeast with sugarWorking yeast into sugar helped liquefy it before the liquid went in. If you use instant yeast, you can skip this step and stir it into the dry flour instead.
- Rolls laid close togetherSetting them touching means they rise into one another and stay soft-sided, like a batch loaf. Space them apart if you want a crust all round.
- One hour in a warm placeThat single rise happens after shaping, with no bulk fermentation. With modern yeast the shaped rolls will be ready when visibly puffed and slack to the touch; the flavour is milder than a two-stage dough.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 rolls of a size that fills the palm. Best eaten the day they are baked.
Caraway had a long run in British baking as the default "seed" of seed cake and seed rolls, cheap, strongly aromatic, and old-fashioned enough that Victorian writers already treated it as a taste inherited from their grandparents. The recipe sits in Cassell's, and its structure, flour rubbed with butter, eggs beaten in, one rise after shaping, marks it as a domestic dough rather than a baker's: quick to get into the oven and made in a quantity that suited a household of several people and a single morning. The costing of one shilling is typical of the period's dictionaries of cookery.