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Parker House Rolls
Rub one tablespoon of lard into two quarts of flour. Moisten one cake of Larkin Dry Yeast. Scald one pint of milk, and when cool, but not cold, add to the flour. Beat well, adding one teaspoon of salt, one half cup of sugar and the softened yeast. Let rise. These can be mixed in the morning and be ready to use for supper, or they may be mixed at noon, allowed to rise until bedtime, mixed again, and be baked for breakfast. The dough at the second kneading should be rolled thin, cut with a biscuit-cutter, spread with melted butter, folded, allowed to rise and then baked.
A plain overnight roll dough, written for cooks who knew what bread dough should feel like and so were told very little. Two points need attention before you start: the liquid is short, and no oven temperature is given at all.
- The flour-to-liquid ratio is offTwo quarts of flour is roughly 8 cups, or about 2 lb, against only 1 pint of milk. That will not come together as a dough. Plan on adding liquid — warm milk or water — until you have a soft, slightly tacky dough, or scale the flour down to about 4 cups for the pint of milk.
- One cake of Larkin Dry YeastA dry yeast cake of the period is usually reckoned as roughly one modern packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, though period dry cakes were slower-acting and less predictable. Soften it in a few tablespoons of the warm milk with a pinch of the sugar rather than in plain water.
- "Cool, but not cold"Scalded milk must come down to about 105-110F before it meets the yeast. Above roughly 130F the yeast dies, and the recipe gives you no second chance.
- Why scald at allScalding is usually said to denature a heat-sensitive component of raw milk (commonly identified as a whey protein) that slackens gluten. With pasteurised milk it is generally treated as optional; warming to 110F is enough.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake these at 400-425F for 12-15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the folded seam has set.
- The fold is the pointRoll the dough about 1/4 inch thick, cut rounds, brush with melted butter, then fold just off-centre so the top overhangs slightly. The butter keeps the two halves from knitting together, which is what gives the finished roll its hinge.
- The long riseThe morning-to-supper and noon-to-bedtime schedules assume a cool kitchen and a modest amount of yeast. In a 70F room the first rise will run 1 1/2 to 2 hours; refrigerate the dough overnight instead if you want the original timetable without over-proofing.
- YieldThe full quantity as written makes a very large batch, several dozen rolls with a 2 1/2-inch cutter. They are best within hours of baking and reheat well wrapped in foil.
Parker House rolls take their name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in the 1850s and became one of the best-known dining rooms in the country; the folded roll is generally traced to its kitchen, and the often-repeated tale of an angry baker flinging unfinished rolls into the oven is tradition rather than documented fact. By the time this recipe was printed the name had long since escaped the hotel and become a generic term for any soft, buttered, folded dinner roll. The appearance of a named brand of yeast in the ingredient list is a reminder of how many American cookbooks of this era circulated as promotional literature, distributed by grocery and household-goods firms whose own products were written into the instructions.