Swedish Rolls
2 teaspoons salt cup sugar 1 cup currants 3 tablespoons cinnamon flour to knead cup chopped citron Melt butter in scalded milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast, salt, eggs well beaten and flour to knead. Let rise; roll into a sheet; brush with melted butter; dredge with cinnamon and sugar; sprinkle with citron and currants; roll like jelly roll; cut in one half inch slices; place on buttered sheet; let rise. Bake one half hour.
The ingredient list as printed is badly truncated — the milk, butter, eggs and yeast are all named in the method but their quantities were lost in typesetting, and the fractions before "cup sugar" and "cup chopped citron" have dropped out. What follows fills in the working details; the proportions themselves have to be judged against a standard sweet dough.
- Missing quantitiesMilk, butter, eggs and yeast appear only in the instructions. A sweet roll dough of this scale would typically run about 1 cup scalded milk, 1/4 cup butter, 2 eggs and one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) instant or active dry yeast to roughly 4 cups flour. The dropped fractions before "cup sugar" and "cup chopped citron" cannot be recovered; 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup are plausible guesses against a dough of that size.
- Three tablespoons cinnamonThat figure is for the filling, dredged over the buttered sheet along with sugar, not worked into the dough. It is a generous but not impossible amount; two tablespoons gives a less aggressive roll.
- Dissolved yeastIn 1907 this usually meant a compressed yeast cake softened in a little lukewarm water, though dry yeast cakes were also sold. Modern active dry yeast behaves the same way; instant yeast can go straight into the flour. Either way the milk must be cooled to lukewarm — around 110F — before the yeast meets it, since hot milk will kill it.
- Why the milk is scaldedHeating milk to just below boiling was originally about keeping unpasteurized milk sound, but it also deactivates whey proteins that slacken gluten. With pasteurized milk you can simply warm it, though scalding still gives a slightly softer crumb.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 350F to 375F; half an hour at 350F suits rolls cut a half inch thick and risen until puffed. They are done at 190F internal, or when the coiled centers no longer look wet.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday time and increasingly hard to find. Candied orange peel or chopped mixed peel substitutes directly. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh berries; plump them in hot water and drain well or they scorch.
- Slicing and the second riseHalf-inch slices are thinner than modern cinnamon rolls, so they bake faster and crisp more at the edges. Cut with a serrated knife or a length of thread to avoid crushing the spiral, set them cut-side down with room to expand, and let them rise until doubled before baking.
- YieldWith the quantities missing, any yield is a guess: a dough of the size assumed above, rolled and cut at half an inch, would give something in the region of two dozen small rolls.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like most such books it was written to sell an ingredient — hence the celebrated chocolate chapters and a more workaday bread section like this one. The rolls belong to the broad family of rolled, spiced yeast breads; the Swedish kanelbulle tradition is usually dated to the 1920s in Sweden itself, later than this book, and American cookbooks of the period attached the label "Swedish" loosely to cardamom- or cinnamon-scented sweet doughs. The candied citron and currants may suggest something richer than an everyday roll, though the recipe itself gives no occasion for it.