Dinner Rolls
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 3 cups sifted flour White of one egg 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 1/2 teaspoonful salt THESE are rolls that assure you out-and-out Bread-enjoyment with every course. You won't need to "trust to luck" if you follow this recipe. Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add one and one-half cups flour and beat until smooth, then add white of egg well beaten, lard or butter, remainder of flour, or enough to make a moderately firm dough, and the salt. Knead lightly, using as little flour in kneading as possible, or "throw and roll" as shown on page 15. Place in well-greased bowl. Cover and set to rise in a warm place, free from draught, until double in bulk--about two hours. Mould into rolls the size of walnuts. Place in well-greased pans, protect from draught, and let rise one-half hour, or until light. Glaze with white of egg, diluted with water. Bake ten minutes in a hot oven.
Lean by the standards of this booklet: an egg white, two tablespoons of fat, and no sugar beyond the spoonful that starts the yeast. The result is a plain roll meant to be eaten alongside food rather than noticed.
- Count on two egg whitesThe ingredient list calls for the white of one egg in the dough, and then the glaze asks for white of egg thinned with water. The booklet does not reconcile the two. Either set aside a second egg, or glaze with milk, which browns more gently and costs nothing.
- Lard or butterThe choice is genuinely open throughout this book. Lard gives a softer, shorter crumb and a paler roll; butter gives flavour and a slightly firmer one. Either is measured melted.
- The size of walnutsA walnut in its shell, not a shelled kernel — a lump of dough an inch and a half or so across. Rolls that small bake through in the ten minutes given; larger ones will not.
- As little flour as possibleThis is the one instruction in the recipe that is strict, and it is worth obeying. The dough is meant to stay slack, and flour worked in at the board makes the rolls tough. A lightly oiled surface and a bench scraper are easier than dusting.
- Ten minutes is not longA hot oven, about 425°F (220°C), and the first look at eight minutes. With only an egg-white glaze and no sugar, these stay pale, so judge by the set of the crust rather than deep colour.
The booklet capitalizes Bread throughout, as though it were a proper noun, and this page shows what the capital letter is for. The selling point is not flavour but certainty. The line about not needing to trust to luck is aimed at a reader who remembered yeast kept alive at home from one baking to the next, or bought as a dried cake of unpredictable vigour, where a dead ferment meant a day’s flour and a day’s work lost. Compressed yeast was sold fresh and worked to a schedule that could be printed, and nearly every recipe in this book advertises that quietly by stating its rising times in minutes and hours as if they were facts rather than hopes.