Crescents
Shape Parker House Roll mixture into balls then into sticks. Roll sticks in shape of crescents, let rise, and bake.
A shaping variation rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Parker House Roll dough, an enriched milk-and-butter yeast dough, resting in front of you. The instructions it leaves out are the ones worth filling in.
- The dough it depends onParker House dough of this era is typically scalded milk, butter, sugar, salt, yeast and flour, mixed soft and given a first rise. Any modern enriched dinner-roll dough behaves much the same way under this shaping.
- Yeast conversionsBase recipes of this period generally call for a compressed yeast cake, though cake sizes were not standardised. A modern 0.6 oz cake is roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast.
- Ball, then stick, then crescentRolling to a ball first tightens the surface so the stick tapers evenly. Roll each stick about 6 inches long with thin ends and a thicker middle, then curve the ends toward each other. These are hand-rolled crescents, not the rolled-up triangles of laminated dough.
- The rise after shapingCovered and left in a warm spot, shaped crescents need roughly 30 to 45 minutes and should look puffy but not slack. Overproofed crescents relax and lose the curve in the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Small enriched rolls want a hot oven, 400 to 425F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until deep gold. Lower and slower dries them out before they colour.
- FinishA brush of milk or beaten egg before baking gives the shine expected of a company roll; melted butter brushed on straight from the oven keeps the crust soft.
- YieldA batch of this kind gives roughly two to two and a half dozen crescents at this size. They stale quickly and are best the day they are baked.
Crescent rolls are generally said to have reached American cookbooks through Vienna rather than France: the Viennese kipferl, and the steam-baked "Vienna bread" that impressed visitors at the great international exhibitions of the later nineteenth century, made the shape a mark of a refined bakery. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston and written by Maria Willett Howard, the crescent had become simply one of a set of shapes a competent cook was expected to produce from a single dinner-roll dough. That parent roll is traditionally credited to Boston's Parker House hotel, though the date usually given for it varies, and its dough, rich with milk and butter but not laminated, is what distinguishes these rolls from the buttery croissant they resemble in outline.