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Milk Rolls (Eggless)
2 cups hot mashed potatoes 4 cups scalded milk ½ cup butter ½ cup white sugar 1 tablespoon (heaping) salt 1 yeast cake Five Roses flour.
Pour scalded milk over mashed potatoes, then add butter, sugar and salt. Cool until lukewarm, then add yeast cake that has previously been soaked in a half cup of lukewarm water. Add flour until quite as stiff as bread dough. Let rise overnight. Roll until ½ inch thick, cut with cake cutter, spread with melted butter and fold together. Let rise and bake about 20 minutes. If you use Five Roses flour, you will be surprised at the beauty as well as the quality of these rolls.
A large potato-dough batch scaled for a household that baked once or twice a week. Nothing here is difficult, but the original leaves out the oven temperature, the flour quantity and the yield, and the yeast is measured in a form that no longer exists.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is roughly 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast, or one standard 1/4-oz packet. Soaking it in half a cup of lukewarm water is still the right move; the liquid should be no hotter than about 110F or the yeast is damaged.
- Wait for lukewarmThis is the hinge. Four cups of scalded milk poured over two cups of hot potato holds heat for a long time in a heavy bowl. Add the yeast too early and the batch will not rise overnight, which is the only leavening in an eggless dough.
- Scalding milkScalding was done to kill wild organisms and to deactivate whey proteins that slacken a dough. With pasteurized milk only the second reason survives, and it is a real one for a soft roll, so heating the milk is still worth doing.
- Flour quantityNone is given because it depends on how wet the potatoes are. Expect somewhere in the range of 10 to 14 cups for this volume of liquid, added gradually until the dough is as stiff as a bread dough and no longer sticky at the sides.
- Oven temperatureUnstated. Soft enriched rolls of this type bake at 375F to 400F, and 20 minutes at that heat suits rolls cut with a cutter and folded. They are done when the tops are deep gold and the bottoms sound hollow.
- Cake cutter and the foldA cake cutter is a plain round cutter, 2 to 3 inches across. Rolling to half an inch, buttering, and folding one half over the other makes what is now called a Parker House roll; the butter keeps the seam from sealing so the roll opens cleanly.
- SaltA heaping tablespoon reads alarmingly, but it is spread over six cups of liquid plus ten or more cups of flour. It works out near the low end of normal for bread. Use a level tablespoon plus a half if you prefer to measure.
- Yield and keepingThis makes about four dozen rolls. Halve it for a modern household, or bake the whole batch and freeze the surplus; potato doughs stay soft longer than plain ones, which was much of their appeal.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and like most miller's books it exists to sell flour, which is why the recipe ends by praising the brand rather than telling you how many rolls you get. The dish itself belongs to a long North American tradition of potato bread: mashed potato holds moisture, feeds the yeast with easily fermentable starch, and stretches expensive white flour, all of which mattered in a farm kitchen. "Eggless" in the title is a selling point, not an omission — eggs were seasonal and dear, and cooks looked for recipes that gave a rich, tender crumb without them, the potato doing the work an egg would otherwise do. The folded round is the form generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century, by then so widespread in Canadian and American home baking that this book does not bother to name it.