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Ice-Box Rolls
1 cake Fleishman's yeast. 3/4 C sugar. 1 cake Fleishman's yeast 1 C warm water 2 C boiling water 2 heaping T lard 1 t salt 2 eggs Soak yeast in the warm water; mix the boiling water, lard, sugar and salt, and when cool add the yeast and the eggs, well beaten. Mix in flour enough to make as stiff as bread dough or a little stiffer. Do this in the evening and set all night. Next morning, knead down stiff and set in ice-box or very cold place. As you want biscuits, pinch off dough right size and let rise. Bake about 15 minutes in hot oven. Dough will keep several days if kept cold.
A refrigerator dough of the sort that let a cook bake fresh rolls every morning from one evening's work. The ingredient list omits the sugar that the method calls for, so you will have to supply it.
- The missing sugarSugar appears in the instructions but never in the list, so something has dropped out somewhere between the contributor and the page. For this volume of liquid, 1/3 to 1/2 cup is a common proportion in comparable ice-box rolls; less gives a plainer, more bread-like roll.
- One cake of yeastA household cake of Fleischmann's compressed yeast was commonly about 0.6 oz, though larger cakes were also sold. Substitute one 1/4-oz packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed yeast was soaked in lukewarm water, not hot; keep the soaking water under 110F.
- Let the hot liquid cool properlyThe two cups of boiling water must come down to lukewarm before the yeast and beaten eggs go in, or the yeast dies and the eggs scramble. This is the hinge of the recipe. Test with a finger, or a thermometer at 100-110F.
- Flour quantityThree cups of liquid plus two eggs will take roughly 7 to 8 cups of all-purpose flour to reach stiff bread-dough consistency. Add it gradually; the exact figure depends on your flour and the humidity.
- LardTwo heaping tablespoons is roughly 3 level tablespoons. Butter or shortening works, though lard gives a tender, slightly savoury crumb.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-425F. Small rolls at that heat take about 15 minutes, as written; check at 12.
- The overnight rise and the chillThe dough ferments at room temperature overnight, is knocked back in the morning, then goes cold. Modern kitchens are often warmer than a period kitchen — if your room runs above 72F, expect a faster, looser rise and be ready to deflate it before it collapses.
- Shaping and final riseCold dough is slow. Allow 1 1/2 to 2 hours for pinched-off rolls to double in a warm spot, not the 30 minutes a room-temperature dough would need.
- Keeping and yieldKeep the dough covered and airtight; "several days" is probably three or four before the flavour turns sour and the gluten slackens. The full batch makes roughly three dozen dinner rolls.
Ice-box rolls belong to the era when a mechanically cooled cabinet, or a genuine ice-box stocked by the ice man, became common enough in American kitchens to change how bread was made. Cold dough ferments slowly rather than not at all, so a single evening's mixing could yield hot rolls at several successive meals — a real saving of labour in a household without a bakery on the corner. The brand name in the ingredient list is worth noting: Fleischmann's compressed yeast, sold in foil-wrapped cakes and delivered fresh, is often said to have been widely enough used by the early twentieth century that cooks wrote the trademark where they meant the ingredient. Compiled cook books of this kind are full of such shorthand, and full too of small omissions like the missing sugar here — the contributor knew what was meant, and assumed the reader would as well.