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Breakfast Rolls (Yeast Cake)
4 quarts Five Roses flour (sifted) ½ pint new milk 1½ pints water 2 tablespoons white sugar 1 teaspoon salt ½ yeast cake.
Make into soft sponge at night. Let rise. Roll and spread with melted butter and roll over. Make into rolls, let rise light, and bake 1/2 hour.
A contributed recipe of the terse sort, written for a cook who already knew what a sponge was and how her own stove behaved. The measurements are sound but the batch is enormous by current standards.
- ScaleFour quarts of sifted flour is roughly 4 to 4½ lb, enough for four to five dozen rolls. Quartering the recipe (1 quart flour, 2 oz milk, 6 oz water, 1½ tsp sugar, ¼ tsp salt) gives a manageable dozen or so.
- The yeast cakeHalf a yeast cake means half of one small commercial cake; sizes varied, and in this period "yeast cake" could mean either a compressed fresh cake or a dry one, so the exact weight is uncertain. Something on the order of a teaspoon of modern active dry or instant yeast is a reasonable stand-in for the full batch. The amount is small because the sponge works overnight in a cool kitchen; a full modern packet risks overproofing the dough by morning.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh milk, unskimmed and, in this period, unpasteurized; whole milk is the equivalent. Many older recipes call for milk to be scalded first; this one does not.
- Soft spongeThe liquid, yeast, sugar and part of the flour are beaten to a batter at night; the remaining flour is presumed to go in when you knead the next morning, though the recipe gives the flour as a single quantity. Keep the sponge genuinely soft.
- Rolling with butterThe dough is rolled out, spread with melted butter and turned over on itself before shaping. This is the same principle as a Parker House roll, where the butter layer keeps the fold from sealing, though "roll over" may equally describe rolling the sheet up.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood or coal range judged by hand. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. The half hour specified suits large rolls; small rolls of two ounces or so will be done sooner, when the tops are deep gold and the base sounds hollow.
- Second rise"Let rise light" means proofed until visibly puffed and slow to spring back when pressed; in a warm kitchen that will usually take somewhere in the region of 45 minutes to an hour.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and its contents came largely from Canadian housewives who wrote in with recipes using Five Roses flour — which is why entries like this one are so compressed, and why the flour brand is named in the ingredient list. A batch built on four quarts of flour tells you plainly what kind of household the book addressed: bread was baked at home, in quantity, and rolls were made from a sponge set the night before so the oven could be fired once in the morning. Earlier household rolls of this kind would often have started from a homemade hop or potato barm rather than a bought yeast cake.