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Rolls
Two quarts of flour, one teaspoon of salt, two tablespoons of lard, one pint of milk, a scant half cup of sugar, one-third of a cake of compressed yeast dissolved in one cup of lukewarm water. Mix the salt and flour, and work in the lard with the tips of the fingers. Scald the milk and add the sugar to it; remove from the fire and when the milk is lukewarm add the dissolved yeast. Make a well in the center of the flour and pour into it the milk and yeast mixture. Sprinkle a little of the flour over the top and set the mixture away for four or five hours or until the center is full of bubbles. Then mix all together thoroughly with a spoon and knead a little so that it is smooth. Then let the dough rise until very light, mould it into rolls of any desired shape; let them rise till nearly double in size, and bake twenty or thirty minutes. When browned brush the tops with a little sugar mixed with milk, and return to the oven a moment to glaze the rolls. If the rolls are wanted for lunch, they may be started late in the afternoon, mixed at nine or ten o'clock and moulded and baked in the morning. If for tea, they may be started in the morning, in which case it is well to use one-half instead of one-third of a cake of yeast.
— Miss Fanny Selden
A straightforward overnight sponge-and-dough roll, written for a cook who knew her own oven. The only real puzzles are the yeast and the missing temperature.
- The measurements in modern termsTwo quarts of flour is about 8 cups, roughly 2 lb; a pint of milk is 2 cups. A scant half cup of sugar and two tablespoons of lard are as written. The total liquid is one pint of milk plus the cup of water the yeast is dissolved in.
- Compressed yeastA modern compressed cake is 0.6 oz (17 g), so one-third is about 6 g fresh, equivalent to roughly 3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast. Older cakes were not standardized, so treat this as approximate. The small amount is deliberate: the long four- or five-hour sponge does the work.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Rolls of this size want 400F; twenty minutes will usually do it, thirty only for large or tightly packed ones.
- The hinge: wait for the bubblesThe sponge is not ready on a clock but on appearance — the well in the center of the flour must be visibly foaming and full of bubbles before you stir the whole thing together. Mixing early gives dense, yeasty rolls no amount of later rising will fix.
- Scalding the milkBring it just to the point of steaming and small bubbles at the edge, not a rolling boil, and let it cool to lukewarm (about 105F) before the yeast goes in. Hot milk kills yeast. Scalding kept raw milk from souring the dough; the modern explanation adds that it deactivates whey proteins that slacken gluten.
- LardRubbed into the flour with the fingertips, as for pastry. Butter or shortening works, though lard gives the tenderer, slightly flaky crumb the recipe was built around.
- The milk-and-sugar glazeStir a teaspoon or so of sugar into a tablespoon of milk, brush the browned tops, and give them a minute back in the oven — long enough to set to a shine, not long enough to darken further.
- Yield and scheduleTwo quarts of flour makes roughly two to three dozen dinner rolls, depending on the size you mould them. Miss Selden's two timetables still work: an afternoon sponge, mixed at nine or ten at night, shaped and baked in the morning; or a morning start with the larger amount of yeast for rolls at teatime.
The yeast instructions offer a rough sense of the page's period: compressed yeast, sold in cakes, is generally said to have spread through American groceries from the later 1870s onward, though it did not simply displace the homemade hop-and-potato yeasts and salt-rising starters that earlier receipts assumed, which persisted alongside it. What survives from the older practice is the sponge and a very little yeast left to bubble for hours — which gave both flavor and insurance when leavening was still not entirely reliable. The two alternative timetables at the end are the most telling detail: rolls were expected fresh at a particular meal, and the household schedule, not the recipe, decided how much yeast went in.