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Bird's Eyes
1 C sugar. 1/2 C shortening. 1 t salt. 2 eggs, beaten. 2 C warm milk 1 cake comp. yeast, dissolved in little of the milk 6 C flour Cream sugar, shortening, salt, then add other ingredients and let rise until light. Then turn on to moulding board and roll into a sheet one-half inch thick, brush with melted butter, sprinkle with raisins and chopped nuts. Then roll into a roll and cut in slices about one inch thick and put in muffin tins, let rise until light, brush with melted butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake.
Alma Timmerman. 1 T lard in 2 C milk, scalded and cooled 2 T sugar
A pinwheel sweet roll typed up in the compressed shorthand of a community cookbook — the ingredient list has clearly been jumbled in setting, with part of it stranded at the end. Read it as one list before you start.
- Reassemble the ingredientsThe working list is: 2 cups milk scalded with 1 tablespoon lard and cooled to warm, 2 tablespoons sugar, salt, 1 cake compressed yeast dissolved in a little of the milk, and 6 cups flour. The instruction to "cream sugar, shortening, salt" belongs to the lard-and-sugar step, not to a separate creaming of butter.
- No salt quantity is givenThe original omits it. Two teaspoons for six cups of flour is a workable modern proportion.
- Compressed yeast"1 cake comp. yeast" is most likely the small cake of fresh compressed yeast, generally reckoned at 0.6 oz and treated as equivalent to one 1/4 oz packet (about 2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry, though compressed yeast was also sold in larger cakes. Fresh cake yeast dissolves in the warm milk; dry yeast can go in the same way.
- Scald and coolScalding milk was done to inactivate enzymes in raw milk that slackened dough. With pasteurized milk it is unnecessary, but the lard still needs melting into it, and the milk should come back down to about 110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast begins to be damaged.
- No oven temperatureBake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are browned and a roll pulled from the center of the tin sounds hollow. Enriched sweet doughs with sugar on top scorch above 400F.
- Rising times"Until light" means roughly doubled: an hour to ninety minutes for the first rise in a warm room, 30 to 45 minutes for the shaped rolls in the tins. Judge by the dough, not the clock.
- Quantities for the fillingNone are given. About 1/4 cup melted butter, 1 cup raisins and 1 cup chopped nuts covers a half-inch sheet of this much dough; the cinnamon sugar on top is roughly 1/4 cup sugar to 1 teaspoon cinnamon.
- YieldSix cups of flour gives 18 to 24 one-inch slices, so plan on two standard 12-cup muffin tins.
Spiral sweet rolls of this kind turn up under a range of local names in community cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and "Bird's Eyes" is a fair description of what a cut slice looks like sitting in a muffin cup, a dark ring of raisin and nut around a pale center. What dates the recipe most nearly is the yeast: a single cake of compressed yeast, sold refrigerated and perishable, was a standard leaven in American kitchens from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until active dry yeast reached home cooks during and after the Second World War, and recipes calling for "1 cake" often do not trouble to name a brand or size. The rest is ordinary economy -- lard rather than butter in the dough, butter saved for brushing where it will be tasted, and a contributor's name attached in the usual manner of subscription cookbooks.