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Parker House Rolls
2 cups scalded milk 3 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup warm water Five Roses flour.
Add the butter, sugar, and salt to the milk. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast cake, and stir in 3 cups flour. Beat well, cover, and let rise until light; then add enough flour to knead (about 2½ cups).
Let rise again, toss on to a lightly-floured board, knead and roll out to inch thickness. Shape with a round biscuit cutter dipped in flour. Then with the handle of a case knife make a crease through the centre of each round. Brush one half over with melted butter, fold and press the edges together. Place 1 inch apart in greased pan, cover, let rise, and then bake for about 15 minutes in a hot oven to a delicate brown.
A straightforward enriched white dough; the only real obstacles are the yeast measurement, the oven description, and a fraction that dropped out of the text.
- The missing fraction"roll out to inch thickness" is almost certainly a typesetting loss of a fraction (a quarter or a third of an inch) — a full inch of dough folded over would give an unmanageable roll. Roll thin enough that the folded round is not much more than about ¾ inch thick before proofing.
- One yeast cakeA compressed cake of the period was about ⅗ oz. Substitute one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast, dissolved in the ¼ cup warm water at about 110F, or the same weight of fresh yeast if you can find it.
- Hot ovenRead as 400–425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for rolls of this size; they should be pale gold rather than deeply browned, which is what "delicate brown" is asking for.
- Scalding the milkScalding was done in part to kill bacteria and destroy enzymes in raw milk; with pasteurised milk it is usually treated as unnecessary, though heating and cooling to lukewarm does no harm. If you skip it, warm the milk to about 100F so the butter softens and the yeast is not shocked.
- Case knifeA case knife is an ordinary table knife, said to be so called from being kept in a case of cutlery. The recipe uses its handle to press a crease across each round, not to cut through it.
- Flour quantitiesThree cups in the sponge plus about 2½ cups for kneading gives roughly 5½ cups, but treat the second addition as a guide and stop when the dough is soft and only slightly tacky.
- The two rises"Let rise until light" means roughly doubled — about an hour at normal room temperature for the sponge, the same again after kneading, and 30 to 45 minutes for the shaped rolls. Slower and cooler gives better flavour.
- YieldAbout two dozen rolls from a 2½-inch cutter. They keep poorly and are meant to be eaten the day they are baked; the butter-folded seam is what lets them pull open cleanly at the table.
The fold-and-crease shape takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in 1855, and the roll is generally traced to its kitchens in the 1870s — the usual telling involves a cook folding unfinished dough in temper, which is the sort of origin story that circulates without documentation. What is certain is that by the time this Canadian flour-company book appeared the shape had become standard in North American cookery, printed in Fannie Farmer and countless milling-company pamphlets in almost identical wording. Books like the Five Roses collection were distributed by millers to sell flour, so they favoured reliable, widely recognised yeast doughs that would make a home baker loyal to a brand; a hotel roll everyone had heard of was exactly the right advertisement.