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Baps
Sift 4 pounds of flour into a basin, melt 4 ounces of butter in 1½ pints of sweet milk, make a space in the center of the flour and pour in the milk, add 1 teacupful of fresh yeast, mix and stir well, then add I dessert-spoonful of salt, and 2 well-beaten eggs and stir them well into flour and let stand in a warm place for six hours. Then beat it up one way with your hand for fifteen minutes and form the rolls with as little flour as possible. You may put this dough in small pans or form into round rolls, bake them in a hot oven for twenty minutes, and brush them over with a little water when you take them out of the oven.
A Scottish breakfast roll, scaled for a household that baked in quantity: four pounds of flour will give you two to three dozen baps. The dough is soft, enriched only lightly, and meant to come out pale and floury rather than crusty.
- The liquid quantityThe printed page gives 1½ pints of sweet milk for the four pounds of flour, which is what our text now reads. Work toward a soft, slack dough, adding a little more milk if the flour is dry.
- Scale it downFour pounds is about 14 to 15 cups of flour. A quarter batch — 1 lb flour, 1 oz butter, roughly 10 fl oz milk, 1/2 to 1 tsp salt, and 1 egg (a practical rounding upward, since half an egg is awkward) — gives six to eight rolls and is far easier to manage.
- Fresh yeastA teacupful of "fresh yeast" means brewer's barm or soft compressed yeast, both wet, and barm variable in strength. For 4 lb flour use about 1 1/2 oz fresh cake yeast, or roughly 4 tsp instant dried (less if you want a long, slow rise); scale proportionally if you reduce the batch.
- Six hours is for weak yeastWith modern yeast the first rise will be done in 60 to 90 minutes at room temperature. Judge by volume — roughly doubled — not by the clock. A long cold rise in the refrigerator is a better way to get the old flavour.
- Sweet milkSimply means fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or sour milk used in soda breads. Whole milk is closest to what was meant.
- "Beat it up one way"This is the knead, done in the bowl with one hand turning the dough in a single direction. Fifteen minutes by hand becomes 8 to 10 minutes in a mixer with a dough hook; the dough should be smooth and slightly tacky.
- Hot ovenRead as 425F. Twenty minutes suits a roll of about 3 oz; smaller ones will be done in 12 to 15. Baps are meant to be soft, so pull them while still pale gold.
- The water brushBrushing straight from the oven softens the crust as it cools — the point of a bap. A dusting of flour on the shaped rolls before baking, and a thumb pressed into each centre to stop them doming, are the other traditional touches.
Baps are Scottish, recorded in Scots from at least the sixteenth century, and the word's origin is genuinely unknown — no convincing derivation has ever been settled on. What defines them is not shape but texture: a soft, floury-topped morning roll, kneaded and proved rather than raised with soda, and eaten warm at breakfast or split around bacon. The enrichment is minimal, four ounces of butter and two eggs spread across four pounds of flour, so the dough is barely richer than plain bread while baking up considerably softer.