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Parker House Rolls
Prepare firm dough by taking 1 quart of flour, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, 1 tablespoonful of butter or lard, and 1 pint of milk. Sift together the flour, salt, and powder; rub in the shortening; add the milk, and mix to a smooth dough, to be easily handled. Flour the board, turn out the dough, and knead thoroughly to make it smooth. Roll out to thickness of half an inch. Cut into three-inch circles. Press a pencil down across the middle of each; rub the edges with soft butter. Double each one over, and lay them an inch apart on flat, greased pans. Brush with milk, and bake in a hot oven.
This is the quick-bread version of the Parker House roll — baking powder instead of yeast, mixed and baked inside half an hour. Handle it like biscuit dough rather than bread dough and it behaves.
- Add the milk graduallyA quart of flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb) and a pint of milk is 2 cups, which will give a dough far too slack to roll and cut. Hold back a third of the milk and add only enough to bring the flour together into a dough that can be turned out and handled.
- Kneading means a dozen turnsDespite the instruction to "knead thoroughly," this is a chemically leavened dough. Fold and press it eight to twelve times, just until the surface is smooth; longer work makes the rolls tough and coarse.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for 4 cups of flour is light by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon per cup of flour. Four teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a better rise in these rolls.
- Hot ovenRead "hot" as 425-450F. At that heat the folded rolls need about 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are browned and the fold has set.
- The pencil creaseThe point of pressing a line across the middle is to thin the dough at the hinge so the roll opens cleanly at the table. Use a floured chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon and press firmly without cutting through.
- Butter the fold, not the edgesButter and the fold -- The recipe says to rub the edges with soft butter before doubling each round over. Many versions of this roll instead butter the surface inside the crease, so that the two halves do not fuse in the oven and the roll pulls apart at the table; if you find the halves sticking together, try the butter inside the fold.
- Pans and spacingAn inch apart on a greased sheet gives rolls with crisp sides. Set them closer, nearly touching, if you want softer flanks.
- YieldThree-inch rounds from this quantity of dough, with the scraps re-rolled, give about 16 to 18 folded rolls. They are best within an hour of baking.
The folded, hinged dinner roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in 1855 and where the shape is generally traced to the hotel's bakery in the decades after. The hotel's own rolls were yeast-raised and slow, which is precisely why versions like this one proliferated in turn-of-the-century compilations: chemical leavening let a household cook produce something with the right silhouette and the right pull-apart fold in the time it took the oven to heat. Recipes of this era freely borrow a famous restaurant's name for a domestic shortcut, and the borrowing tells you how thoroughly the Parker House roll had become a fixed idea of what a proper dinner roll looked like.