English Breakfast Cakes or Rolls

A two-stage yeast dough: a slack sponge is raised for two hours, then stiffened with a butter-and-flour rub into a soft roll dough. The instructions assume a cook who knows what dough should feel like, so the quantities beyond the flour are deliberately open.

• The flour and the liquidTwo pounds of flour is about 7 cups. "As much warm milk and water ... as will smooth it" means enough to bring it to a smooth batter, not an equal weight; the quantity is deliberately left to the cook. Use half milk, half water at blood heat, added until the batter slackens.
• A quarter of a pint of fresh yeastThis is liquid barm or brewer's yeast, a thin ferment far weaker than anything sold today. About 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or a 2/3 oz cake of fresh compressed yeast, does the same work for this quantity of flour.
• The butter rub"A little flour and butter well rubbed together" is a rough beurre manié worked into the risen sponge — figure 2 to 3 oz butter rubbed into a handful of flour. It enriches the crumb and helps stiffen the batter into a dough at the same time.
• Oven heatNo oven temperature is given. Fifteen to twenty minutes for small rolls implies a fairly hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 425F to 450F.
• Second riseThe recipe moves straight from shaping to baking, but the shaped rolls want 20 to 30 minutes covered on the tins before they go in, or the crumb will be tight.
• "Rasp"To rasp is to scrape the baked crust with a coarse grater or rasp, removing the hard outer skin to leave a fine pale surface. It was standard for breakfast rolls and fancy breads; a microplane over the cooled crust does it, and the scrapings were saved as raspings for coating dishes.
• Keeping them coveredRasped rolls will stale faster, having lost the protective outer crust. Wrapping them warm in a cloth appears to be the point of the instruction, and they are best eaten soon after baking.
• YieldTwo pounds of flour gives about 16 to 20 rolls of breakfast size.