Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Rolls (T salt C flour cake)
Rolls (T salt C flour cake)
1 T lard in 2 C milk, scalded and cooled 1/2 T salt 3 C flour 1 cake Fleischmann yeast Beat well and set in a warm place to rise for one and one-half hours. When light, add 3 cups flour. Knead lightly and set in a warm place until light. Roll out on a floured board and spread with melted butter; cut with cookie cutter, fold over letting the edges come together. Place in a well greased pan, cover and let rise again. Bake in a hot oven fifteen to twenty minutes. 1 yeast cake 1¼ C milk 2 T sugar
This is a sponge-method Parker House roll, printed with the ingredient list broken across the instructions and partly scrambled. Read the whole thing before starting, because the order on the page is not the order of work.
- What the recipe actually isA sponge is made from the milk, sugar, salt, yeast and the first 3 cups of flour; after 1½ hours the remaining 3 cups are worked in. Total flour is 6 cups, roughly 1 lb 10 oz, and the second yeast cake listed at the end is most likely a duplication of the first rather than an additional cake, though the page does not say so.
- The milk quantityThe printed page gives 1¼ cups milk, which is what our text now reads. With six cups of flour in total, add the milk gradually and judge the dough by feel.
- Fleischmann yeast cakeOne cake in this period was compressed fresh yeast, usually given as about 0.6 oz. One packet or 2¼ teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast is the usual substitute. Period practice was to scald the milk and cool it to lukewarm before adding the yeast, though the recipe itself says nothing about this.
- Butter is not in the listNo fat goes into the dough; the only butter is brushed on the rolled-out sheet before folding. That melted butter is what keeps the fold from sealing and gives the split-top hinge these rolls are known for. Be generous with it.
- Cutting and foldingRoll out, cut rounds with a cookie cutter, brush with the melted butter and fold each round over so the edges meet, as the recipe directs, then place them in the greased pan.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. Fifteen to twenty minutes is plausible at that heat for rolls this size; pull them when the tops are deep gold and the sides have set.
- Timing the second and third rises"until light" means roughly doubled, perhaps an hour for the bulk rise and 30 to 45 minutes for the shaped rolls in a warm room. Modern flour is generally stronger than household flour of the period, so knead lightly as instructed and do not overwork.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two to three dozen rolls from 6 cups of flour is a reasonable expectation.
Fleischmann's compressed yeast, sold in foil-wrapped cakes from the late nineteenth century, is the reason a recipe like this could appear in a small-town church cookbook at all: before reliable commercial yeast, a cook kept her own barm or salt-rising starter and timings were guesswork. The company printed sponge-method roll recipes on its own literature and gave them away, which is one explanation for how such versions turn up in community collections with the brand name written directly into the ingredient list. The folded shape is traditionally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston, where a similar roll is said to have been served in the same era; by the time the women of this congregation were compiling their book the form had long since become simply what a good dinner roll looked like. The garbled ingredient list is itself characteristic of the genre, where handwritten contributions went to a local printer with little editing.