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Cinnamon Rolls
Take 1 quart of light bread sponge.
Add 1 egg, a little mace, ½ cup sugar, cup butter and½ cup lard. Beat well with a wooden spoon and add Five Roses flour, but put it in slowly and do not mix too namon. stiff. Mix down twice, and the third time take out on board but do not kneadsimply roll out thin, leaving the dough about 1 inch thick. Spread with soft butter till every part is covered, and sprinkle with about 1 cup sugar. Dust with cin- Roll dough very tightly and pinch ends. Cut with sharp bread knife, and set closely together in pan. When light, put melted butter over them and bake 15 to 20 minutes in moderate oven, or till a light brown. Remove from oven, place on table and brush over with melted butter again. When cool (not cold) spread with thin icing made as follows: 1 cup sugar and ⅔ cup milk or cream boiled till it threads. Let cool and apply as on cake.
A sweet roll built on a piece of already-risen bread dough rather than a dough mixed from scratch, which is how most turn-of-the-century kitchens made enriched buns on a baking day.
- Light bread spongeA quart of "light bread sponge" is the risen first stage of a white ("light") bread mixture: soft, bubbly and roughly 2 lb by weight, though the recipe gives it only by volume. A lean white bread sponge or a soft dough at first full rise will serve; the recipe assumes there is some already working in the crock.
- The fat is ambiguousThe original reads "cup butter" with no fraction, alongside a clearly stated half cup of lard. It was very likely half a cup of each, but the number has been lost, so treat the butter as a judgment call and err on the smaller side.
- LardHalf a cup of lard can be replaced with the same volume of butter or shortening. Lard gives a slightly softer, less flavourful crumb than all butter.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally taken as about 350-375F. Fifteen to twenty minutes suits rolls set close together in a pan; they will be pale on the sides and light brown on top.
- Mace and cinnamonThe mace goes into the dough, the cinnamon onto the buttered sheet with the second cup of sugar. Ground mace loses its perfume fast, so use a fresh jar or substitute a scant amount of nutmeg.
- Do not kneadThe instruction not to knead at the final stage matters. The dough has already been mixed down twice; working it again tightens the gluten and gives a bready, chewy roll instead of a tender one. Roll it out and leave it alone.
- Thickness"Roll out thin, leaving the dough about 1 inch thick" is contradictory by modern habit. Aim for about half an inch, which rolls up into a spiral with visible layers; an inch of dough gives few turns and a doughy centre.
- The icingOne cup sugar boiled with two-thirds cup milk or cream "till it threads" is a soft syrup icing, thread stage being somewhere around 225-234F on a thermometer. Cool it before spreading or it will slide off. It sets to a soft skin rather than staying wet like a thin glaze.
- YieldExpect about 18 to 24 rolls from this quantity, depending on how thickly you cut them. They are best the day they are baked.
Sweet spiral rolls of this kind belong to a long northern European family of enriched breads, and North American cookbooks of the early 1900s printed them under a variety of names: cinnamon rolls, cinnamon buns, snails. What dates this version is its starting point. Rather than mixing a dough, it takes a quart of sponge already working in the bread crock, which is exactly how a household that baked bread two or three times a week would produce a treat without an extra rise. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled largely from recipes contributed by users of the company's flour across Canada, so the assumption that a reader has bread sponge on hand at any given hour of the morning is not a stylistic flourish but a fair description of the kitchen it was written for.