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Parker House Rolls (Mrs F B Wilson cake compressed)
Mrs. F. B. Wilson. 1 cake compressed yeast, dissolved in little of the milk 4 C flour Combine above ingredients. Let rise until light, then add enough more flour to knead. Knead until dough ceases to stick and is smooth to the touch. Put in bowl and let rise until twice its bulk, then turn on to moulding board, roll out into a sheet one-half inch thick, cut, brush with melted butter, fold so that the upper edge overlaps the under one, press edges together, let rise and bake.
1/2 C sugar. 2 C warm milk. Alma Timmerman. 1/2 C shortening 1 t salt 2 eggs, beaten
A classic sponge-and-dough roll built on four cups of flour and a cake of fresh yeast. The instructions for shaping and baking are complete; the quantities of liquid, fat, sugar and salt are not fully stated, so treat this as a method to be read alongside a working roll formula rather than a standalone list.
- The fold is the whole pointBrush the half-inch sheet with melted butter before folding, and let the upper edge overlap rather than meet the lower. The butter keeps the crease from sealing, so the roll splits open along the fold as it bakes — that hinge is what makes a Parker House roll rather than a plain dinner roll.
- One cake of compressed yeastHousehold cakes were commonly about 0.6 oz, though sizes on sale varied. Substitute one packet, roughly 2¼ teaspoons, of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed yeast was dissolved in warm liquid as here; instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- Ambiguous amountsThe milk is given only as "a little" for dissolving the yeast, and no total liquid, sugar or butter quantity appears for the dough itself. For four cups of flour, expect somewhere near 1¼ cups of milk in total; the printed text does not settle it.
- "12 C shortening" is out of rangeThis line falls after a second contributor's name, along with the salt and eggs, so it may belong to a following recipe rather than to this dough. Either way, no enriched roll dough takes twelve cups of fat to four cups of flour; read it as a fraction that has lost its numerator — a quarter to a half cup of shortening or butter is the usual proportion.
- Rising in a warm kitchen"Until light" for the sponge means visibly bubbled and domed, 45 minutes to an hour at modern room temperature. The second rise to double bulk takes about the same; the shaped rolls need 30 to 40 minutes on the pan.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Soft dinner rolls of this size bake at 400°F for 15 to 18 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the folds have opened.
- Cutting"Cut" is unspecified; a plain round cutter of roughly 2½ inches suits this shape. Set the folded rolls close together on a buttered pan so they support one another and stay soft on the sides.
- YieldFour cups of flour gives roughly 24 rolls of this shape.
Parker House rolls take their name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, opened in 1855; the split, buttered fold is traditionally credited to its kitchen, though the story of an angry or hurried baker crimping the dough is the sort of tale hotels tell about themselves and is not documented. By the time committees were collecting recipes in the early twentieth century, the roll had become a fixed item of American home baking, and its appearance here — contributed under a member's name — reflects how quickly a hotel specialty became domestic property. The reliance on a cake of compressed yeast dates the recipe as much as the name does: foil-wrapped fresh yeast spread through American kitchens from the 1870s onward and was the usual commercial leaven for decades, until dry granular yeast, developed in the 1940s, gradually displaced it over the following years.