Bread: Bake
Brush over the top with melted butter , cut across the middle, but not quite through the dough, with the back of a silver knife. Fold over and lay nearly double then press down to make the dough adhere; allow . Bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven, and brush with melted butter.
Swiss Rolls. 2 cupfuls milk, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, ¼ cupful butter, 1 cake yeast, 1½ quarts flour, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Scald the milk and melt the sugar and butter; when lukewarm, add the butter; when lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast. Stir in the flour and set in a warm place to raise. Turn out on a floured bread board, roll till an inch thick, brush the top over with melted butter, and roll up the sheet of dough like a rolled jelly cake. Press it lightly into shape and cut from the end slices about an inch thick ; put the slices, cut side up, into a greased pan and let rise until they have doubled in height. Bake in a hot oven twenty minutes, and brush over with melted butter.
Two recipes have run together here: the tail end of a folded pocketbook-style roll, then Swiss Rolls, which are cinnamon-less spiral buns baked cut side up. The text carries several typesetting slips worth sorting out before you start.
- The garbled line"press down to make the dough adhere; allow ." is missing its object — the sense is allow the folded rolls to rise again before baking. Give them 20 to 30 minutes on the pan until visibly puffed.
- "4 cupful butter"Almost certainly ¼ cupful, the fraction bar lost in printing. Four cups of butter to two cups of milk would be an impossible dough. Use 4 tablespoons (½ stick).
- The repeated clause"melt the sugar and butter; when lukewarm, add the butter; when lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast" is a compositor's duplication. Melt the sugar and butter into the scalded milk, cool to lukewarm, then add the yeast.
- A cake of yeastCompressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes whose size varied by maker. Taking the modern 0.6 oz cake as the equivalent, use roughly 2¼ teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, dissolved in a little of the warm milk.
- 1½ quarts flourFlour was measured by volume in bulk: 1½ quarts is 6 cups, about 26 to 28 oz. Hold back the last cup and add it as needed — the dough should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally taken as about 400 to 450F, so around 425F. The fifteen and twenty minute times are plausible at that heat for rolls of this size; pull them when the tops are deep gold and the centres read about 190F.
- First rise"Set in a warm place to raise" means until roughly doubled, an hour to ninety minutes at 75F with modern yeast. The dough is stirred, not kneaded, at this stage; knead briefly after turning it out to get a sheet that rolls cleanly.
- Rolling and cuttingAn inch-thick sheet is thicker than modern practice; rolling to about ½ inch gives more turns in the spiral and a better crumb. Cut the log with a serrated knife or a length of thread to avoid crushing the coils.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 rolls. Set them close together in the pan so they support one another as they rise and stay tall.
"Swiss rolls" here means a spiral yeast bun rather than the sponge-and-jam log the name denotes in Britain; the connection is only the method, dough rolled into a sheet and coiled like a jelly cake, which is exactly the comparison the author reaches for. Compressed yeast, sold in cakes and delivered fresh, is a marker of the era: it was widely available in cities from the 1890s, which is why the recipe can call for one cake without further explanation and expect a rise in an hour rather than overnight.