Lunch Rolls
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 1/4 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 4 cups sifted flour 1 egg 1 teaspoonful salt NOTHING goes better with luncheon than a generous plateful of fresh, crusty rolls. This recipe will enable you to start your rolls as late as 9:30 a.m. and serve them warm and crisp at noon.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk. Add lard or butter and two cups of flour. Beat thoroughly, then add egg well beaten, balance of flour gradually, and salt.
When all of the flour is added, or enough to make a dough that can be handled, turn on board and knead lightly and thoroughly, using as little flour in the kneading as possible, or "throw and roll" as shown on page 15. Place in well-greased bowl. Cover and set aside in a warm place, free from draught, to rise about two hours.
When light, form into small biscuits the size of a walnut. Place one inch apart, in well-greased shallow pans. Let rise until double in bulk--about half an hour. Brush with egg and milk, and bake ten minutes in hot oven.
A soft, egg-enriched roll built around a timetable: the booklet promises a nine-thirty start and rolls on the table at noon. The arithmetic holds, but it depends on a warm kitchen.
- The timetable, checkedTwo hours for the first rise, half an hour for the second, ten minutes in the oven — two hours and forty minutes, with the mixing fitted into the margin. Those rise times assume a kitchen with a range burning all morning. In a house at modern room temperature, allow half again as long, or set the covered bowl in an oven with nothing on but the light.
- Scalding the milkNearly every recipe in this book begins with milk scalded and cooled. The step dealt with raw milk and with whey proteins that slacken a dough, and pasteurized milk has already been heated well past that point. Warm it to blood heat and carry on; the cooling stage disappears along with the scalding.
- Keep the dough softThe instruction to use as little flour as possible in the kneading is the one that decides the result. Four cups of flour against a cup and a quarter of milk plus an egg is meant to be tacky in the hand. Flour worked in off the board to make it pleasant to handle is what turns these rolls dense.
- "Throw and roll"The booklet sends the reader to an illustration on page 15 that is not reproduced here. It names a kneading method for a slack dough, and any thorough kneading reaches the same place — by hand, or six to eight minutes on a dough hook.
- Walnut-sized, an inch apartPieces that small spread and touch as they rise, so what comes out of the pan is soft-sided pull-apart rolls rather than separate crusty ones. Space them further for individual rolls with crust all round. The booklet gives no yield; four cups of flour at walnut size makes a great many.
- Egg wash and a genuinely hot ovenEgg beaten into milk gives both the shine and the depth of color. Ten minutes implies real heat, around 425°F (220°C). Rolls this size dry out if they are left to take their time at a lower temperature.
The selling point here is the clock, not the roll. The booklet goes out of its way to say that the dough can be started at half past nine and served warm at noon, and that promise is the whole argument for compressed yeast. Bread raised on a ferment kept alive in the house was a project begun the night before and attended to; a cake of commercial yeast, bought fresh and sold through the grocer, collapsed the business into a single morning. Everything else in the recipe is ordinary — milk, butter, an egg, flour, salt. What is being advertised is the schedule.