Braids
Use Parker House Roll mixture; make in small balls; roll balls into long sticks; fasten three ends together and braid. Cut braids into four-inch lengths; let rise; bake. When done brush with melted butter.
A shaping instruction more than a recipe: the dough is borrowed from the Parker House rolls elsewhere in the book, and everything here happens between mixing and the oven. Two points in the original need reading carefully.
- The base doughA Parker House roll mixture of this period is an enriched white yeast dough — scalded milk, butter, a little sugar and salt, yeast and flour, kneaded and given a first rise until doubled. Any modern soft dinner-roll dough of that type works; a lean water dough will braid but bakes up dry and pale.
- Braid, then cutRead the order literally: three long ropes are braided into one continuous plait, and the plait is then cut into four-inch lengths. Pinch the cut ends together firmly or they unravel as the yeast pushes them apart in the oven. Shaping individual small braids gives a tidier result if you would rather not fight the cuts.
- Rope thicknessRoll the balls to about half an inch thick and 10 to 12 inches long. Anything thicker and a four-inch section becomes a loaf rather than a roll; anything thinner and the braid closes up into a smooth log.
- "Let rise"The second rise runs 30 to 45 minutes at normal room temperature, until the braids look puffed and a fingertip dent springs back slowly. Do not take them to fully doubled — a braided shape that overproofs slumps sideways and loses its definition.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperature at all, only 'bake'. Bake at 400F for 12 to 18 minutes depending on size, until the tops are deep gold. Small enriched rolls at a lower temperature dry out before they colour.
- The butter finishBrushing with melted butter straight from the oven softens the crust and gives the shine. If you want a darker, glossier braid, an egg wash before baking does that instead; the two together makes the surface heavy.
- YieldWorking from a Parker House dough of roughly a pint of milk to five or six cups of flour, expect something in the region of two dozen four-inch braids.
Braided rolls are the shaped end of a bread tradition that runs through central and eastern Europe — challah, zopf, kalács — and by the turn of the twentieth century American cookbooks had absorbed the technique as a way of dressing up a dough already in the house rather than as a recipe of its own. That is exactly how it appears here: no ingredients at all, just a set of hands-on instructions applied to the Parker House roll mixture printed elsewhere in the book. Parker House rolls themselves are generally traced to the kitchen of Boston's Parker House hotel in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1900 the name had become generic shorthand for a soft, buttery, milk-enriched dinner dough. The economy of the entry is characteristic of American household manuals of the period, which expected a cook to master a handful of base doughs and then vary them endlessly by shape — braids, twists, crescents, clover-leafs — for the sake of a varied bread basket.