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Vienna Rolls
Sift two or three times one quart of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder and half a teaspoon of salt. Work in one tablespoon of butter, add one pint of milk, stirring into a dough of the usual consistency. Roll to the thickness of half an inch. Cut into circular forms and fold over once, moistening a little between the folds if necessary to make them stick. Butter the baking pans well, and do not let the rolls touch each other. When placed thereon, moisten the tops of the rolls with a little milk, or butter melted in milk, and bake in a hot oven.
— Mrs. George S. Harding
A quick baking-powder roll shaped like a Parker House roll, meant to be mixed and baked in under half an hour. Two things in the original need a second look: the liquid and the leavening.
- Quart of flourA quart measure of sifted flour is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. Sifting two or three times helped aerate the coarser, unbleached flour of the period and distribute the baking powder evenly. One thorough sift with modern all-purpose flour will generally do the same job.
- A pint of milk is a lotTwo cups of milk to 4 cups of flour gives a slack, sticky dough that will be hard to roll to half an inch without extra flour. Hold back half a cup and add it only as needed. Aim for a dough just firm enough to handle on a well-floured board.
- Baking powder ratioTwo teaspoons for a quart of flour is light by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup. Baking powders of the period varied in strength. Four teaspoons will give a more reliable lift.
- A hot oven425–450F. At that heat the rolls need about 12 to 15 minutes; pull them when the tops are golden and the folded edge has set. A cooler oven lets the soft dough spread before the crumb sets.
- The foldCut rounds of about 2½ to 3 inches and fold each over once. The recipe has you moisten a little between the folds if needed so the halves stick.
- Do not let them touchThis is deliberate. Spaced rolls brown on all sides and stay crisp; crowded ones steam each other and the folds slump together. Use two pans rather than crowding one.
- Milk washMilk, or butter melted in milk, gives a soft matte crust rather than the shine of an egg wash. Brush again as they come out of the oven if you want them glossier.
- Yield and servingAbout 16 to 20 rolls depending on cutter size. They are at their best within an hour of baking — there is no yeast structure to hold them, and they go dry by the next day.
The name attached itself in the later nineteenth century to almost any small, crusty, fine-crumbed dinner roll, after the Viennese bakers whose steam-baked breads were widely admired at the international exhibitions of the 1870s. Genuine Vienna bread depended on a strong wheat flour, a long yeast fermentation and steam injected into the oven — none of which is happening here. What Mrs. Harding offers is the American shortcut: baking powder standing in for yeast, and a folded round in place of the shaped Viennese loaf, so that hot rolls could be on the table in half an hour rather than half a day. Chemical leavening was already familiar in household baking by the time books like this one were compiled, and community collections of the kind are full of these adaptations, where a borrowed European name signals the intended result rather than the method.