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Clover Leaf Rolls
2 qts. flour. 1 1/2 cake Fleishmann's yeast. 1½ cake Fleishmann's yeast 1/4 C sugar 1 t salt 1 C scalded milk 1. C water Fannie Grinnell. 1 T lard or shortening Soak yeast in little water, scald milk, add shortening and sugar, then add cup of cold water. Add other ingredients. Mix with as little stirring as possible. Let raise 2½ hours. Pinch off a little dough at a time, placing three small bits in each gem pan, making a clover leaf. let raise 2½ hours.
Bake as raised biscuits.
A community-cookbook shorthand written by someone who assumed the reader already knew how to make bread dough — the flour is never mentioned at all. Everything else is straightforward once the yeast and the pan are translated.
- The missing flourTwo cups of liquid takes roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour to make a soft roll dough. Add it gradually until the dough pulls together and is barely tacky; the instruction to "mix with as little stirring as possible" means a soft, lightly handled dough, not a heavily kneaded one.
- Fleischmann's cake yeastA cake meant compressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes of roughly 0.6 oz. One cake is about equal to one 2¼-teaspoon packet of active dry, so 1½ cakes is roughly 3½ teaspoons. Fresh cake yeast is still sold in some markets but is far less common than it once was.
- Order of the liquidsThe cup of cold water after the scalded milk is not decorative — it brings the mixture down to blood heat so the soaked yeast is not killed when it goes in. Check the temperature before combining rather than trusting the ratio.
- Gem panA gem pan is a muffin tin, often with smaller cups than a modern standard tin. A standard 12-cup muffin pan works; three pieces of dough per cup, each about the size of a walnut.
- "Bake as raised biscuits"Raised biscuits were generally baked in a hot oven; roughly 400 to 425F for 15 to 20 minutes is a reasonable modern reading, though the recipe specifies no temperature. Bake until the tops are well browned. Clover leaf rolls look done before they are — the seams between the three balls stay pale.
- The two long risesTwo and a half hours twice suits a cooler kitchen than most modern ones. With modern yeast in a warm room, judge by volume rather than the clock: the first rise until doubled, the second until the shaped rolls are puffy and hold a fingerprint, often under an hour each.
- ShorteningA tablespoon of lard gives a tender crumb and a faint savouriness. Butter or a neutral shortening substitutes directly at the same quantity.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 24 rolls depending on how generously the pieces are pinched off. They are best within hours of baking and reheat well wrapped in foil.
Clover leaf rolls — three balls of dough crowded into one muffin cup so they bake into a trefoil that pulls apart at the table — were a familiar form at American suppers and Sunday dinners in the early twentieth century, when gem pans were common and packaged yeast gave a more dependable rise than homemade barm. Fleischmann's compressed yeast, sold in foil-wrapped cakes and delivered fresh, is named outright here, in the way brand names entered community cookbooks once national advertising made them shorthand for a standard rather than a preference. The recipe's most telling feature is what it leaves out: Fannie Grinnell gave no flour quantity at all, presumably because she expected a reader who would add flour until the dough felt right. Compiled cookbooks of this kind are full of such gaps — aides-memoire among people who already cooked alike, not instructions for strangers.