Rolls, Excellent
INGREDIENTS for 6 good-sized rolls.-1 lb. of flour, 1 oz. of butter, 1/4 pint of milk, a large teaspoonful of yeast, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, 5d.
Warm the butter in the milk, add to it the yeast and salt, and mix these ingredients well together. Put the flour into a pan, stir in the above ingredients and let fire throughout the operation is absolutely the dough rise, covered in a warm place. necessary to insure a good result. When the article to be dressed is thin and delicate, the fire may be small; but when the joint is large, the fire must fill the grate. Meat must never be put down before a hollow or exhausted fire, which may soon want recruiting; on the other hand, if the heat of the fire become too fierce, the meat must be removed to a considerable distance till it has somewhat abated. Some cooks always fail in roasting, though they succeed in nearly everything else. A French writer on the culinary art says that anybody can learn how to cook, but one must be born a roaster. According to Liebig, beef or mutton cannot be said to be sufficiently roasted, until it has acquired throughout the whole mass a temperature of 158°. But poultry may be well cooked when the inner parts have attained a temperature of 130° to 140°. This depends on the greater amount of blood which beef and mutton contain, the colouring matter of blood not being coagulable under 158°.
Robert Sauce (for Steaks, &c.). - INGREDIENTS for sauce for dish for 5 or 6 persons.-2 oz. of butter, 3 onions, 1 teaspoonful of flour, 4 tablespoonfuls of gravy or stock, salt and pepper to taste, 1 teaspoonful of made mustard, 1 teaspoonful of vinegar, the juice of lemon. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Put the butter into a stewpan, set it on the fire, and, when browning, throw in the onions, which must be cut into small ROLLS.
Knead it well, make it into rolls, let them rise again for a few minutes, and bake in a quick oven. Richer rolls may be made by adding 1 or 2 eggs and a larger proportion of butter, and their appearance improved by brushing the tops over with yolk of egg or a little milk.
TIME. This quantity, divided into 6 rolls, from 15 to 20 minutes.
The page as printed is a scrambling of the compositor's type: a paragraph on roasting meat and the opening of Robert Sauce have been dropped into the middle of the roll method. Read the first sentence, then skip to "Knead it well" — that is the whole recipe.
- The text to ignoreThe intrusion runs from "let fire throughout the operation" to "cut into small", but it is interleaved line by line: the phrase "the dough rise, covered in a warm place" inside that stretch belongs to the roll method, while the rest belongs to two other entries.
- A warning inside the stray textThe intruded roasting passage cites Liebig's figure of 130–140°F for the inner parts of poultry. That is well below the 165°F/74°C now required for poultry, and should not be followed if you find it repeated elsewhere in the book.
- Flour and liquid1 lb of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; 1/4 imperial pint of milk is 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 cup. That ratio gives a very stiff dough by modern standards — expect to add another 2–4 fl oz of warm milk or water to bring it together.
- Yeast"A large teaspoonful of yeast" means fresh compressed yeast or brewer's barm, both far weaker by volume than modern dried yeast. Use about 1 teaspoon of instant dried yeast, or roughly 1/3 to 1/2 oz fresh.
- RisingNo rise times are given. Allow roughly an hour for the first rise until doubled, and 20-30 minutes for the shaped rolls, longer in a cool room.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean about 425-450°F (220-230°C); the book itself gives no temperature. At that heat 15-20 minutes is right for six rolls from a pound of flour; they should sound hollow when tapped underneath.
- The enriched versionAdding 1–2 eggs and more butter, as suggested, turns this into a soft breakfast roll and will slow the rise. Reduce the milk slightly to compensate for the egg.
- Yield and costSix good-sized rolls. The 5d. average cost is a period marker, not a guide -- Beeton gave an average cost for most recipes, so a mistress could check the household books against her cook's spending.
Beeton's household books were reissued and re-set many times after 1861, and a mangled page like this one shows two adjacent columns of type interleaved — the sort of scrambling that can arise in re-setting or in the scanning and transcription of two-column pages. The recipe itself is the plainest sort of English breakfast roll, leavened with barm — the yeasty head skimmed from fermenting beer — which was the ordinary domestic leaven before compressed baker's yeast became widely available in Britain in the later nineteenth century. The roasting passage that has strayed into it is worth noticing for its appeal to Justus von Liebig, the German chemist whose theories about meat, juices and "sealing in" flavour were widely influential in Victorian cookery writing and were largely overturned by later work.