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Corn Meal Rolls
1 1/2 cups wheat flour 3/4 cup corn meal 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix with the meal. Rub the butter into the dry ingredients; add the milk to the dry ingredients. Add more milk if necessary to make a soft dough. Roll out on a floured board, handling lightly. Cut with a round biscuit cutter, fold like Parker House rolls, and bake in a quick oven.
A baking-powder biscuit dough stretched with corn meal, shaped like a dinner roll. It works, but the liquid as printed is short and the oven needs to be hotter than most people expect.
- The milk is shortHalf a cup will not bring 2 1/4 cups of dry ingredients together, and the recipe itself allows for "more milk if necessary." Expect to use 3/4 to a full cup, added gradually, until the dough just holds as a soft mass.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. A chemically leavened dough needs the high heat to get its lift before the crumb sets; a moderate oven gives flat, dry rolls.
- Baking timeNone is given. At around 425F these take about 12-15 minutes, until the tops are browned and the folded edge looks dry.
- Wheat flourMeans plain white flour, what we call all-purpose. The distinction mattered in a period when corn meal was promoted as a substitute for wheat.
- Corn mealUse a fine or medium grind. Coarse modern polenta-grade meal stays gritty in a fast-baked dough; if that is all you have, soak it in the milk for 15 minutes first.
- Rubbing in the butterKeep the butter cold and work it to a coarse crumb, as for biscuits. Two tablespoons for this quantity of flour is lean, so any melting or overworking shows up directly as toughness.
- The Parker House foldRoll to about 1/2 inch, cut rounds, crease each slightly off-centre with the back of a knife and fold the smaller half over the larger. Brushing the crease with a little melted butter keeps the two halves from fusing shut.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 rolls from a 2-inch cutter. Best eaten within an hour or two of baking; corn meal quick breads stale fast.
Corn meal in a wheat roll was both economy and policy. Wartime food conservation campaigns in the United States and Britain pressed households to save wheat flour for the armies and their allies, and cookbooks of the period fill their bread chapters with rolls, muffins and gems built on corn, oat, barley and potato in place of some of the wheat. The shape borrowed here is older: the folded, buttered dinner roll is generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century "fold like Parker House rolls" needed no further explanation in an American kitchen. Grafting that fashionable yeast-roll shape onto a plain baking-powder corn meal dough is a fair picture of how the period made restriction look like hospitality.