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Parker House Rolls
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 pint milk, scalded and cooled 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 4 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 3 pints sifted flour 1 teaspoonful salt THESE delightful little "individual Breads" are among the most popular of rolls. The name denotes the shape into which you mould them before the last lightening.
Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm milk, add lard or butter and one and one-half pints of flour. Beat until perfectly smooth. Cover and let rise in a warm place one hour, or until light.
Then add remainder of flour, or enough to make a dough, and the salt. Knead well, or "throw and roll" as shown on page 15. Place in greased bowl. Cover and let rise in a warm place for about one and one-half hours, or until double in bulk.
Roll out one-fourth inch thick. Brush over lightly with melted butter, cut with two-inch biscuit cutter, crease through center heavily with dull edge of knife, and fold over in pocket-book shape.
Place in well-greased, shallow pans one inch apart. Cover and let rise until light--about three-quarters of an hour. Bake ten minutes in hot oven.
A plain milk-and-butter roll whose entire identity is in the fold. The ingredients are unremarkable; the measurements and the shaping are what need translating.
- Flour measured by the pintThree pints of sifted flour is six cups, and one pint of milk is two. The booklet measures dry goods in liquid measure throughout, which is consistent once expected. Sift first and then measure, in that order: sifted flour measured by volume weighs appreciably less than flour scooped from the bag, and this dough is meant to stay soft.
- One cake for six cupsA single cake, about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, raises the whole batch, and the schedule is correspondingly unhurried: an hour on the sponge, an hour and a half on the dough, three-quarters on the shaped rolls. It is the most sensible yeast proportion in the booklet and worth noting against the recipes that push for two.
- The foldRoll a quarter inch thick, cut two-inch rounds, brush with melted butter, press a deep crease with the dull edge of a knife and fold. The book says to crease through the center; setting the crease slightly off center so the top overlaps the bottom is the usual refinement, and it helps the roll hold its shape through the last rise. The butter in the crease is what keeps the halves separable after baking.
- Throw and roll, page 15The kneading method referred to lives on a page of the booklet not reproduced here, so take the aim from the sentence that survives: knead well, to a dough that is smooth and elastic. Six to eight minutes in a mixer with a dough hook reaches the same place.
- Lard or butter, and they are not the sameFour tablespoons of either. Lard gives a softer crumb and a flatter flavor; butter gives the taste most people now expect from this roll. The booklet treats them as interchangeable because in 1920 they often were, chiefly on price.
- Ten minutes means a hot ovenAround 425°F for so short a bake. Spacing decides the finish: an inch apart gives rolls browned on every side, set closer they knit together and pull apart soft. That choice has to be made before the shaped rolls go in to rise, not after.
By the time this booklet went to press the roll had travelled a long way from the hotel dining room that named it. Fleischmann's does not mention Boston at all. It defines the thing by its shape and nothing else, telling the cook outright that the name denotes the fold, and files it among lunch rolls, dinner rolls and tea rolls as one more use for the same soft dough. That is what becomes of a restaurant speciality once it turns into general property: the story falls away and the gesture remains. The pocket-book fold is still on American tables, usually under no name at all, made by cooks who have never heard of the hotel.