Quick Rolls
Sift 1 pint flour, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, and 1 teaspoonful each of sugar and baking-powder together, rub 1/2 tablespoonful each of butter and lard into it. Mix with 1 cupful of milk, stirring quickly with a spoon. Roll out, spread with soft butter, and roll up. Form into small rolls and brush with melted butter; bake in quick oven.
A plain baking-powder dough given a single butter fold, which is what separates these from drop biscuits. The whole point is speed: mix, roll, fold, bake.
- Work fast and handle littleBaking powder begins reacting the moment the milk goes in, so the dough should be mixed, rolled and folded in a few minutes and put straight into a hot oven. Overworking develops gluten and gives tough, dense rolls.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 oz of sifted all-purpose flour. The recipe has the flour sifted together with the salt, sugar and baking powder; period practice varied as to whether sifting came before or after measuring, and the difference affects how much flour you actually get.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. At that heat small rolls should need somewhere around 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are well browned.
- Butter and lardHalf a tablespoon of each is only about 1/2 oz of fat in total, which makes a lean dough closer to a biscuit than a dinner roll. Lard gives the more tender crumb; all butter works and tastes better, all shortening is the least interesting.
- Leavening is light by modern standardsOne teaspoon of baking powder to 2 cups of flour is well under what a current biscuit recipe uses, which is usually three to four teaspoons. Old or poorly stored baking powder will make matters worse; two or three teaspoons is nearer modern practice.
- The foldThe recipe says only to roll out, spread with soft butter, roll up and "form into small rolls," which is ambiguous. One plausible reading is to cut the rolled log into short lengths and set them cut side up; the butter layer is what gives the pull-apart effect.
- YieldRoughly a dozen small rolls, depending on how you cut them. Like all quick breads they are best eaten warm and go stale fast.
Rolls like these belong to the late-nineteenth-century enthusiasm for chemical leavening, which let a household put hot bread on the table quickly instead of waiting on yeast. Commercial baking powder was widely sold in America from the 1860s onward, and cookbooks of the period offered "quick" counterparts to breads previously raised with barm or sponge. The butter-and-fold step produces a layered effect reminiscent of a laminated yeast roll without the rising time, though there is no evidence here that it was derived from one; the pairing of butter with lard fits a period in which lard was the cheap everyday fat.