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Breakfast Rolls
1 1/2 pints flour; 1/2 pint Indian corn meal (white); 1 teaspoonful salt; 2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder; 1 tablespoonful butter or lard; 3/4 pint milk. Sift together flour, corn meal, salt, and powder; rub in shortening; add the milk, mix smoothly into rather firmer dough than usual. Flour the board, turn out the dough, give it one or two turns to complete its smoothness. Divide it, thus prepared, into pieces size of an egg; again divide these in half, which roll out under the hand until they are long and half the size of one's little finger. Lay on greased baking-tin so that they do not touch. Brush them over with milk. Bake in hot oven seven or eight minutes.
A quick baking-powder dough shaped into thin sticks rather than round rolls; the cornmeal keeps them short and crisp. Measured by volume in pints, which needs translating.
- Pints to cups1 1/2 pints flour is 3 cups (about 13 oz), 1/2 pint cornmeal is 1 cup, and 3/4 pint milk is 1 1/2 cups. Hold back a little of the milk: modern flour absorbs differently and the dough should be firmer than a biscuit dough.
- Indian corn mealPlain white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not masa. A fine or medium grind blends into the dough; coarse stone-ground gives a grittier, more rustic stick.
- Hot ovenRead that as 425-450F. At that heat seven or eight minutes is right for sticks the thickness given; they should be pale gold and firm, not deeply browned.
- The shaping is the pointEach piece is rolled to half the thickness of a little finger, roughly 1/4 inch, so it bakes through almost instantly. Thicker sticks will be doughy inside at eight minutes and leathery by the time the centre sets.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the light side by current practice; today's recipes usually use closer to a teaspoon per cup. The dough will still rise, but expect a dense, breadstick crumb rather than a fluffy one.
- ShorteningOne tablespoon of butter or lard in this much flour is a minimal amount, rubbed in for tenderness rather than flakiness. Butter gives more flavour; lard gives a crisper snap.
- Milk washBrushing with milk rather than egg keeps the surface matte and gives only faint colour. An egg wash would brown them noticeably faster at this oven temperature.
- YieldExpect roughly two to three dozen sticks. They are best soon after baking.
"Indian meal" was the standard nineteenth-century American term for maize meal, distinguishing it from wheat flour, and it survived in print well into the early twentieth century. Recipes of this sort belong to the era after chemical leavening became reliable and cheap: baking powder let a cook put hot bread on the breakfast table quickly, without the overnight sponge that yeast rolls demand. The thin, hand-rolled shape is closer to what would now be called a breadstick than to a soft dinner roll.