Cream Rolls
2 cups sifted bread flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup thin cream Mix the salt with the flour. Stir in the cream. Knead well, and proceed as in making Graham rolls.
Three ingredients and a cross-reference: this is a stiff, unleavened dough whose only fat and only liquid are the same half cup of cream. Almost everything that needs saying concerns hydration and the missing baking instructions.
- The hinge: work the dough hardWith no yeast, soda or baking powder, the only lift comes from steam. Sustained kneading, or a few passes folded and beaten with a rolling pin, develops the gluten that lets a dough this dry hold together rather than baking to a hard pellet.
- "Thin cream"Period cookbooks divide cream into thick (roughly today's heavy cream) and thin. Thin cream is what is now sold as light cream or table cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half is the closest common substitute.
- The dough will feel too dryHalf a cup of liquid to two cups of flour is well under normal bread hydration, and modern bread flour absorbs more than the softer flours of the period. Expect a very stiff dough, and add cream a teaspoon at a time only until the flour is fully damp and holds together.
- Bread flour is deliberateBread flour is specified -- A higher-gluten flour will help a dough this dry hold structure without leavening, so it is worth following the recipe rather than reaching for all-purpose or pastry flour.
- "Proceed as in making Graham rolls"The original relies on a neighbouring recipe for shaping and baking, which is not reproduced here; without it the temperature and time are unknown. A reasonable reconstruction is to divide the dough into small pieces, roll or pat each thin, place on an ungreased sheet, and bake in a hot oven until browned and dry through.
- YieldTwo cups of flour should give roughly a dozen small rolls. Like most such breadstuffs they will be best the day they are baked; if they come out dry and crisp, cooling them completely and keeping them airtight will help.
Rolls of this kind belong to a family of unleavened breadstuffs that appear in the bread chapters of late nineteenth and early twentieth century cookery. Cream does the work of both shortening and liquid, which is why the ingredient list is so short: the fat is already dispersed through the water, so the dough needs no rubbing-in step. The instruction to "proceed as in making Graham rolls" reflects a common habit in period kitchen manuals, which set out one method and then varied the flour and liquid, leaving the reader to look up the parent recipe.