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Raised French Rolls
2 cups sweet milk ¾ cup butter and lard (mixed) cake yeast dissolved in ½ cup water 1 teaspoon salt.
Five Roses flour to make stiff dough.
Let rise overnight. In the morning, add 2 well-beaten eggs. Knead down and let rise again. Make balls size of an egg, and roll each one between the hands to make a long roll. Place close together in even rows on well-buttered pans. Cover and let rise again. Bake in quick oven to a delicate brown. Glaze the top with sweet milk before baking.
A rich overnight roll dough, written for a cook who knew her own flour and her own kitchen. The gaps worth filling are the yeast quantity, the flour quantity and the oven.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that older recipes call for by name. Scalding and cooling it, as was standard practice with raw milk, is unnecessary with pasteurised milk but does no harm.
- The yeast cakeCompressed cakes were sold in more than one size, so the original quantity is uncertain; a modern 0.6 oz cake is equivalent to about 2¼ teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. For a rise that runs all night at modern room temperature, use a quarter to a third of that; a full cake in a warm kitchen will overproof and collapse by morning. A cool room or the refrigerator is closer to the conditions the recipe assumes.
- Flour to make a stiff doughWith 2 cups milk plus ½ cup water, expect roughly 7 to 8 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it gradually and stop at a dough that is firm but still slightly tacky; enriched doughs stiffen further as the butter chills.
- Butter and lard¾ cup of the two mixed, softened, not melted. Half and half is the usual reading. All butter works and gives more flavour; the lard was there for tenderness and economy, and shortening behaves similarly.
- Adding eggs the next dayBeating two eggs into a fully risen dough is deliberate — the second addition of liquid and fat lightens the crumb. Expect the dough to go slack and slippery at first and to need several minutes of kneading, plus a little extra flour, before it comes back together.
- A quick ovenGenerally taken as somewhere around 400 to 425°F. Rolls this size, set close together, take about 12 to 18 minutes; pull them when the tops are pale gold, since the sides will still be soft and white where they touch.
- The milk glazeBrush the tops with milk immediately before the pan goes in, not while the rolls are still proving, or the skin will set and restrict the oven spring. Milk browns gently.
- YieldEgg-sized balls from this quantity of dough give roughly 24 to 30 rolls, filling two large sheet pans. Set them close so they rise into each other and tear apart soft-sided.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour — a promotional volume built almost entirely from recipes contributed by home cooks across the country, which is why so many entries read in the clipped shorthand of a recipe passed between neighbours rather than the fuller style of a professional manual. "French rolls" in North American books of this era rarely means anything specifically French; the name attached itself to any small, shapely, enriched dinner roll, distinguishing it from the plain bread loaf. What marks this one is the overnight dough and the eggs beaten in the following morning.