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Rolls (C flour egg Salt Mrs S Meaker)
4 C flour 1 egg Salt Mrs. S. Meaker. 2T Crisco Scald and cool milk, then add yeast and sugar. Add Crisco and 2 cups flour, beat, then add egg, well beaten, and let rise. Then add remainder of flour, and salt, mix and let rise again; when light shape into rolls.
Minnie Dymond.
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription: milk, yeast and sugar all appear in the method but never in the list, so several quantities have to be inferred. What survives is a standard early-twentieth-century sponge-method dinner roll.
- The missing quantitiesMilk, yeast and sugar are named in the instructions with no amounts given. For four cups of flour a period roll dough would take roughly 1 1/2 cups milk, one cake of yeast and a tablespoon or two of sugar, but these are reconstructions, not the author's figures.
- Yeast then and now"Yeast" in a community cookbook of this period usually means a cake of compressed yeast, about 0.6 oz, dissolved in the cooled milk; dry yeast cakes were also sold. One packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry or instant yeast substitutes for it.
- CriscoCrisco is a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, on the market from 1911, so the recipe cannot be earlier than that. It is still sold; any solid vegetable shortening will serve, and butter can be used, though its water content makes it not quite an exact swap.
- Why scald the milkScalding was done to kill the enzymes and bacteria in unpasteurized milk, and it also denatures whey proteins that otherwise slacken the dough. With modern pasteurized milk you can skip it, but the dough is marginally stronger if you do not.
- Cool it properlyThe hinge of the recipe. Milk much above lukewarm stresses the yeast, and temperatures well above that will kill it outright; add it lukewarm to the touch and no warmer.
- Two rises, both slackThe first rise is on a soft sponge of half the flour, with the Crisco and beaten egg already in it, and will roughly double in an hour or so. Salt goes in only with the second addition of flour; salt slows yeast, so a saltless sponge ferments faster, though the recipe does not say whether that was the intent.
- Baking, which the original omitsShape, let the rolls prove until puffy, and bake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes until browned and hollow-sounding.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes about eighteen dinner rolls in a pan or two dozen small ones.
Community cookbooks like this one gathered recipes as members wrote them out by hand — which is why this page carries two names, Mrs. S. Meaker and Minnie Dymond, and why half the ingredient list has fallen out. The sponge method it describes, building a soft batter of milk, yeast and part of the flour along with the egg and fat and letting it rise before the remaining flour goes in, was the standard way of making light rolls before instant yeast made single-mix doughs reliable. The use of Crisco rather than lard or butter dates the contribution: Procter & Gamble introduced the hydrogenated shortening in 1911 and pushed it hard through recipe pamphlets, and its appearance in a hand-collected community cookbook is a small record of how quickly that marketing took hold in home baking.