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Parker House Rolls (One quart of flour three)
One quart of flour; three teaspoons of sugar; butter size of an egg; one-third cup of yeast. Scald milk enough to make a dough as for bread. Work in the butter and sugar, and let rise. Make into rolls, and let rise again.
— Mrs. Catherine Van Buren
A village cook's shorthand: it assumes you already know how bread dough behaves and how a Parker House roll is folded. The gaps worth filling are the salt, the liquid quantity and the shaping.
- The quart of flourA quart of flour measured by volume is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g of all-purpose. Nineteenth-century flour differed from modern bread flour and absorbed liquid differently, so add the milk gradually rather than all at once.
- Milk "enough to make a dough"Expect somewhere between 1 1/4 and 1 1/2 cups for a quart of flour, remembering that the 1/3 cup of yeast is itself liquid. Scalding is usually explained as denaturing whey proteins in raw milk that slackened dough; with pasteurized milk it is generally considered unnecessary, though warming to blood heat still helps the rise.
- Let the milk coolIf you do scald, bring it back down to about 110F before it meets the yeast. Milk straight off the heat will kill the culture outright.
- One-third cup of yeastThis is liquid yeast pothome-brewed barm or a bottled hop yeast, not a modern packet. Substitute one 1/4 oz packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast, and account for the lost third-cup of liquid by adding a little more milk.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century shorthand for about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- The missing saltMrs. Van Buren omits it, as many handwritten receipts do. Without roughly 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons the rolls will taste flat and the dough will ferment faster than you want.
- ShapingWhat makes these Parker House rolls rather than plain dinner rolls is the fold: roll the dough to about 1/2 inch, cut rounds with a cutter, press a crease slightly off-center with the back of a knife, brush with melted butter, and fold the smaller half over the larger. The offset is why they open cleanly at the seam.
- Rising and bakingFigure about an hour for the first rise and 30 to 45 minutes after shaping. Bake at 400F for 15 to 18 minutes, until deep gold; brush with more butter as they come out.
- YieldA quart of flour gives roughly 18 to 24 rolls, depending on the cutter.
The roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, opened by Harvey Parker in 1855, and the folded shape is traditionally credited to that kitchen o the usual story involves a baker flipping half-finished rolls into the oven, which should be treated as legend rather than record. The form does seem to have spread: by the 1880s and 1890s "Parker House rolls" appear in community and church cookbooks across the Northeast, contributed by home cooks who had never seen the hotel. A hotel roll became a village roll because the technique is simple and the result looks deliberate, and because compiled receipt books like this one moved recipes between households. Mrs. Van Buren's version, with its yeast measured by the cupful, still belongs to the era before packaged yeast standardized American bread baking.