Bread: Parker
Parker House Rolls. 7 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 pint milk, 1 yeast cake.
Put 4 cupfuls flour into a mixing bowl with the salt, sugar, and butwith the salt, sugar, and butter; pour on the milk, scalding hot, thoroughly; allow it to cool, then add the dissolved yeast and let the sponge raise till frothy; put in the rest of the flour, mix thoroughly, and knead.
Raise again, then turn out on a baking board and shape into Parker House rolls. The way to make these rolls is to cut off a small ball of dough and roll it flat and thin.
The text is garbled in two places — a phrase repeats, and the instructions break off before baking — so the shaping and the oven have to be supplied from ordinary practice. The dough itself is a straightforward sponge-method milk roll.
- The shaping, finishedRoll each piece of dough into a flat oval about 1/4 inch thick, brush it with melted butter, press a crease across the middle with the back of a knife or a chopstick, then fold it over so the top overhangs slightly. Set the rolls close together on a buttered pan; the butter in the crease is what makes them open cleanly along the seam.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size. Substitute one packet of active dry or instant yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, dissolved in a little of the warm liquid.
- MeasuresOne pint of milk is 2 cups. Seven cupfuls of flour is about 2 lb; expect to hold back the last half cup, since modern flour may absorb differently than the flour of the period.
- Scalding the milkScalding denatures whey proteins that can slacken dough, and was routine with raw milk. Pasteurized milk needs only to be warmed enough to melt the butter. Cool it to about 110F before the yeast goes in.
- The spongeThe first rise with only four cups of flour is a wet sponge, not a dough — it should be batter-like and visibly frothy, usually 45 minutes to an hour at room temperature. This stage builds most of the flavor, so do not shorten it.
- Rising timesThe sponge to frothy, then the kneaded dough until doubled, about an hour; shaped rolls need a further 30 to 45 minutes until puffy and touching.
- OvenThe original stops before baking. Rolls of this size take a hot oven, 400F, for 15 to 18 minutes, until the tops are deep gold. Brush with more butter as they come out.
- YieldAbout 24 to 30 rolls, depending on how thin you roll them.
The Parker House opened in Boston in 1855 under Harvey D. Parker, and by the 1870s its dining room was among the best known in the country; the folded roll that took the hotel's name spread through American cookbooks fast enough that a household compendium like this one could print it with no explanation of what a "Parker House roll" was, assuming every reader knew the shape. The origin story usually told — that a hotel baker, in a temper, flung half-finished dough into the oven and produced the creased, buttered fold by accident — is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe does record faithfully is period technique: a scalded-milk sponge set with a compressed yeast cake, the kind of two-stage rise that was standard before reliable dried yeast and consistent kitchen temperatures made straight doughs the norm.