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Parker House Rolls
2 cups scalded milk 3 tablespoons butter 2-3 teaspoons sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 yeast cake dissolved 1/4 cup lukewarm water About 5 1/2 cups flour To the hot milk, add the butter, sugar and salt. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast cake, and three cups of the flour. Beat thoroughly. Cover and let it rise until light. Cut down, and add about two and a half cups of flour to knead. Let it rise again. Toss on a slightly floured board. Knead and roll out to one-third inch in thickness. Cut with a large floured biscuit cutter. Dip the handle of the knife in flour, and with it make a crease through the middle of each piece. Brush one-half of each piece with melted butter, fold and press edges together. Arrange about one inch apart in buttered pans. Cover, let rise, and bake in a hot oven twelve to fifteen minutes until delicately browned.
A standard early twentieth-century enriched roll dough, written for compressed yeast and a coal-fired range. The conversions are simple; the shaping is where it goes wrong.
- Yeast cakeOne cake of compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz, equivalent to one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve active dry in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as written; instant can go straight into the flour.
- Scalding the milkScalding was traditionally done to deal with something in raw milk that weakens gluten; with modern pasteurized milk it is generally held to be unnecessary, though the recipe still depends on the milk being hot enough to melt the butter, then cooled to lukewarm (about 105F) before the yeast goes in. Milk that is still hot will kill the yeast.
- A hot ovenRead this as 400-425F. Twelve to fifteen minutes at that heat gives the pale gold the recipe calls for; the rolls are small and will dry out if pushed further.
- Flour by feelFive and a half cups is a starting figure. Hold back the last half cup and add only what the dough needs to stop sticking han than a slack dough gives a lighter roll.
- "Cut down" and "until light"Cut down means deflate. Let it rise until light means roughly doubled, about an hour in a warm room for the sponge and again after kneading. Go by volume, not by the clock.
- The crease is the pointThe knife-handle crease compresses a line through the middle so the folded roll hinges cleanly and opens into two lobes in the oven. A shallow or crooked crease gives a lopsided roll that unfolds while baking.
- Butter before foldingBrushing melted butter on the half that gets covered keeps the fold from sealing shut, which is what makes a Parker House roll pull apart in two leaves. Press only the outer edges together.
- Final proofAfter shaping, cover and let the rolls rise until visibly puffy, 30 to 45 minutes. Set an inch apart as directed if you want crisp sides; set them touching for soft-sided rolls.
- YieldAbout two dozen rolls from a large (roughly 3-inch) cutter, more from a smaller one.
The rolls take their name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, opened in 1855 and long famous for its bread; the story usually told is that a baker there folded over a batch of rolls in a fit of temper or haste and found the result better than the original, though the tale is traditional rather than documented. By the time this recipe was printed, the folded roll had escaped the hotel entirely and become a fixture of American cookbooks and boarding-house tables. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book printed a nearly identical formula, and the wording here — scalded milk, one yeast cake, the crease made with a floured knife handle — follows that lineage closely.