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French Rolls (Eggless)
2 quarts Five Roses flour 1 quart new milk (scalded) ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter ½ cup yeast. once.
Cool the milk and add 1 quart flour, the sugar, salt, butter and yeast. Mix in the other quart of flour and let rise overnight. In morning, mix twice, then cut in bun size and roll out. Rub over with melted butter and fold over Let rise and bake. When done, rub over with syrup of sugar and water and sprinkle with sugar.
A large overnight dough from the era of home-brewed liquid yeast, written for cooks who already knew what a roll should look like. The proportions need translating before anything else.
- The flour is measured by volumeTwo quarts is 8 cups, roughly 2 lb / 900 g of all-purpose flour. One quart of milk is 4 cups, which gives a dough near 100 percent hydration — far slacker than any roll dough should be. Expect to work in a good deal more flour during the morning mixing, or start by halving the milk.
- Half a cup of yeastThis means liquid yeast: a homemade barm or potato yeast, or a yeast cake dissolved in liquid, not granules. For a dough this size use about two packets (4½ tsp) of active dry or instant yeast, and remember it is going overnight in a cool kitchen, not a warm one.
- New milk, scalded"New" is fresh milk, straight from the cow and unpasteurized. Scalding was held to improve the dough as well as knocking back bacteria; with pasteurized milk it is unnecessary, though heating and cooling do no harm. The instruction to cool it before adding the yeast still matters — much above 110F the yeast is stressed, and it dies at around 130-140F.
- "Mix twice"Knead the risen dough down, let it recover, and knead it down again. This is the degassing that develops the crumb; it is not a second full proof.
- Cut, roll, butter, foldThis is the Parker House shape: divide into pieces, roll each into a flat oval, brush with melted butter and fold roughly in half so the halves separate at the seam when baked. The butter is what keeps the fold from sealing.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Enriched rolls of this size want a hot oven — 400 to 425F — for 15 to 20 minutes, until deep gold and hollow-sounding underneath.
- The finishing syrupThe original gives no proportions; a simple syrup of roughly equal parts sugar and water, boiled a minute or two, brushed on while the rolls are still hot so it sets to a thin glaze, then sugar on top. On cooled rolls it stays sticky.
- YieldAbout three dozen rolls. Halve everything unless you are baking for a crowd, or freeze half the shaped rolls before the final rise.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who sent in their own recipes — which may be why the instructions assume so much and specify so little. "French rolls" in North American baking of this period often had little to do with France; the name seems to have attached loosely to soft, sweet-glazed dinner rolls, distinguished here mainly by the buttered fold that gives the Parker House shape. Why the title flags "(Eggless)" is not recorded; eggs were seasonal and dear, and an eggless roll may simply have been worth advertising. The half-cup of yeast is the clearest date stamp — home bakers still kept a liquid yeast going and measured it by the cup rather than the packet.