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Finger Rolls
Mix one cup of scalded milk with one tablespoon of butter. When cool, add one teaspoon of sugar, one-half teaspoon of salt, four tablespoons of liquid yeast (one-fourth cup), and flour enough to make a soft dough-about three cups.
Mix well, knead for fifteen minutes and set in a warm place to rise for three or four hours. When light, knead again.
Shape small pieces of dough into balls, then roll on the molding board into a small, long finger roll, pointing the ends.
Place the rolls in a shallow pan, let them rise for one hour, or until double in size, brush them over with a little beaten egg to give a glaze, and bake in a hot oven for ten or fifteen minutes. -Annabel Lee.
A plain milk-dough roll shaped by hand; the only real translation needed is the yeast, which in this book means a homemade liquid starter rather than anything sold in packets.
- Liquid yeastFour tablespoons of liquid yeast was a home-brewed ferment (hop- or potato-based, typically) of unpredictable strength. One standard packet of active dry or instant yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) stands in for it; remember that it no longer supplies the quarter cup of liquid the original yeast did.
- Scalded milkScalding was originally done to kill wild organisms and deactivate whey proteins that slacken dough. Pasteurized milk needs neither, but heating it does dissolve the butter and sugar quickly. Let it cool to about 110F before the yeast goes in, or you will kill it.
- "A hot oven"Read that as roughly 400-425F. Small rolls want high heat and a short bake so the crumb sets before the crust dries out; ten to fifteen minutes suits that range.
- Flour quantityThe recipe says 'about three cups' and calls for a soft dough. Hold back the last half cup and add only what the dough needs to stop sticking.
- Fifteen minutes of kneadingThat is hand-kneading time for a fully developed gluten window. A stand mixer with a dough hook does the same work in six to eight minutes on medium-low.
- Three or four hours risingWith commercial yeast in a 75F kitchen the first rise will be done in an hour to ninety minutes. Judge by volume, not the clock: doubled and domed is "light."
- ShapingRoll each ball under a flat palm on an unfloured board so the surface grips and tapers; a floured board makes the dough slide and the points blunt. Set them close in the pan and they will pull apart soft-sided, or spaced apart for crisp all around.
- Egg glazeBeaten whole egg gives a deep gloss and browns fast. Brush it on thinly just before baking, keeping it off the pan where it will scorch.
- YieldAbout sixteen to eighteen rolls of finger size. They are best within hours of baking and stale quickly, as any lean milk dough does.
Finger rolls belong to the late nineteenth-century American dinner table, where individual rolls in several shapes -- Parker House, clover leaf, twist, finger -- were expected in place of a cut loaf, and shaping is often said to have been a mark of a competent cook. The recipe's call for "liquid yeast" places it at the edge of a change: home cooks kept their own bottled ferments, refreshed from batch to batch, and such instructions were still being printed well after compressed yeast cakes reached grocers in the 1870s and 1880s. The three-to-four-hour first rise reflects the sluggishness and variability of such a starter rather than any deliberate slow fermentation. Whether "Annabel Lee" was the contributor's own name or a pen name shared with Poe's poem is not recorded.