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Vienna Roll Mixture
2 cups scalded milk 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/2 cup lukewarm water 6 cups sifted Gold Medal flour 1/4 cup melted shortening 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 1 egg When the milk is lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake and 3 cups of flour; beat the mixture between five and ten minutes until very smooth and light; cover, set aside in a temperature of 84 degree. When light and puffy add the egg well beaten, melted shortening, salt and sugar and work in slowly 3 cups of flour. Turn onto moulding board, using the remainder of flour as needed. Knead for fifteen or twenty minutes or until the dough ceases to stick and is smooth and elastic to the touch. Cover and set aside until double in bulk. FRENCH TWISTS: When the Vienna Roll mixture is light, turn the dough onto the moulding board, roll it out into rectangular sheet less than one-quarter inch thick, cut this into strips seven inches wide; cut the strips into squares and the squares diagonally into halves. This will form pieces the shape of a triangle. Roll from the side opposite the point of triangle so the point comes below, and bring the ends of the roll together, shaping like a horseshoe. Place on buttered baking sheet some distance apart, let stand until light. Bake in a hot oven fifteen minutes; glaze with white of egg.
A straightforward enriched sponge dough that gets rolled into crescents. The one thing to watch is the flour: the recipe calls for six cups but then adds three, three, and "the remainder," so treat the last of it as a dusting allowance rather than an extra measure.
- Yeast cakeOne cake usually meant a block of compressed fresh yeast of roughly 0.6 oz, though sizes varied by maker. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, dissolved in the half cup of lukewarm water as written.
- Scalding the milkMilk was scalded partly to keep raw milk sweet and partly because something heat-labile in unscalded milk was held to slacken the dough. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, but it should still be brought to lukewarm, as the recipe says, so it does not stall the yeast.
- 84 degreesThat is Fahrenheit, and it is a genuinely useful number: a warm spot around 80-85F. An oven with only the light on, or a turned-off oven with a pan of hot water, holds it well. Go by the recipe's cue -- light and puffy -- rather than a clock.
- Flour quantitySix cups of sifted flour is about 1 1/2 lb. Sifted flour measures light, so weigh it if you can. Hold back the last half cup for the board.
- KneadingFifteen to twenty minutes is right for hand kneading a dough this rich. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, eight to ten minutes on medium-low reaches the same smooth, elastic state.
- Hot oven"Hot oven" is conventionally taken as about 425-450F; the book itself does not define the term. Fifteen minutes at 425F suits rolls of this size; they should be deep gold and sound hollow underneath.
- The glazeThe instruction reads as though the white goes on after baking, though the punctuation leaves the order ambiguous; brushed on after, it gives a thin dull film. Brushing lightly beaten white on just before the rolls go in produces more shine. Either way, keep it thin.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, and the seven-inch squares halved diagonally make large triangles, so expect fewer and bigger crescents than a modern recipe. Half the dough can be held in the refrigerator overnight after the first rise.
"Vienna" attached itself to bread in the second half of the nineteenth century, after Austrian steam-injected ovens and Hungarian roller-milled flour were shown at international exhibitions and made a strong impression on American and British bakers. What survived in domestic cookbooks was less the technology than the idea: a milk-and-egg enriched dough, worked long, with a glazed crust. The French twist here is the same triangle-rolled crescent that later cookbooks call a crescent roll, and it is generally traced to the same Central European baking tradition.