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Parker House Rolls (T salt T shortening C milk t)
12 t salt 3 T shortening ¾ C milk 4 t Royal baking powder 1 T sugar Mix dry ingredients, rub in shortening thoroughly, and add milk. Roll out and cut with large biscuit cutter. Spread with butter and fold together. Bake in quick oven twenty minutes.
Mrs. R. F. Wright.
This is a baking-powder shortcut version of a yeast roll, and the ingredient list has come through with its fractions flattened and its flour missing altogether. Read the quantities below before you start.
- The flour is missingNo flour appears in the printed list, though the method plainly calls for a rolled dough. For this ratio of leavening and liquid, work from about 2 cups of flour — the same proportions as a standard baking-powder biscuit.
- Garbled fractionThe milk quantity reads ¾ cup, matching the printed page. "12 t salt" is still set without its fraction bar and should be read as ½ teaspoon.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F; period usage varies, and some sources run hotter. Twenty minutes at that heat suits rolls of this size; check at fifteen, since a folded roll browns on the crease first.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder at this period, single-acting; the brand survives today as a double-acting powder, and a modern double-acting powder can be substituted measure for measure. Four teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by modern standards, though older cream-of-tartar powders were weaker; get the dough into the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- ShorteningAt this period this meant lard or a vegetable compound. Butter or lard both work; rub it in until the mixture looks like coarse meal and stop there, since overworking gives a tough roll rather than a flaky one.
- The fold is the whole pointCut rounds, brush the surface with softened butter, then fold each round not quite in half so the top overhangs slightly. The butter keeps the halves from knitting, which is what lets a Parker House roll pull open cleanly.
- YieldAbout a dozen rolls from a large (roughly 3-inch) cutter. Bake them close together on the pan so the sides stay soft.
The Parker House roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in 1855 and whose folded, butter-brushed dinner rolls became famous enough that the shape traveled under the hotel's name for the next century; the story that a baker there invented the fold by accident is traditional rather than documented. The hotel's own rolls were a rich yeast dough. What appears here is the church-supper adaptation: the same fold and the same buttered crease, but leavened with baking powder so the rolls could be mixed, cut and baked with no rising time. Community cookbooks of this period are full of such substitutions, and the naming of a specific brand shows how thoroughly the baking powder companies had worked their way into American home cooking.