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Buns
3 level tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract 4 cups sifted flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in the lukewarm liquid. Add enough flour to make an ordinary sponge-about one and one half cups. Beat until perfectly smooth; cover and set aside in a warm place to rise for fifty minutes, or until light. Add sugar and butter creamed, egg beaten, lemon extract and about two and one half cups of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. Add salt with the last of the flour. Knead until smooth and elastic; place in greased bowl; cover and set aside in a warm place place to rise until double in bulk-about one hour. Turn out on board and shape as clover-leaf rolls, or any fancy twist. Let rise until light, about one hour. Bake in hot oven fifteen minutes.
The ingredient list has been cropped in the original leaf — only butter, lemon extract, flour and salt survive, while the method calls for yeast, a lukewarm liquid, sugar and an egg that are never quantified. Treat the text below as a method to follow rather than a complete formula.
- The missing quantitiesFor four cups of flour, a standard sweet-roll dough of this era would use roughly one cake of compressed yeast (one packet of active dry today), one cup of milk or milk and water, about a third of a cup of sugar and one egg. Those figures are reconstruction from comparable period doughs, not from this page, so scale by feel: the dough should be soft but not sticky.
- "Hot oven"In American cookbooks of this period a hot oven is usually given as somewhere between 400 and 450F. Fifteen minutes near 425F suits small clover-leaf rolls in a muffin tin; larger buns will want a slightly cooler oven and a little longer.
- The sponge stageThe first rise is a sponge — yeast, sugar, liquid and about a cup and a half of flour beaten smooth. Fifty minutes is a guide, not a rule; look for a batter that has domed and begun to fall back at the centre. This is where most of the flavour is built, so do not shorten it.
- Lukewarm liquidAim for 100–110°F. Compressed yeast was more forgiving of a cool start than dry yeast is; if the milk is scalded first, cool it properly before the yeast goes in.
- Salt with the last flourSalt goes in with the last of the flour, after the sponge, so the yeast works unchecked through the sponge stage; whether that was the intent or simply the order of work is not stated. Do not omit it -- an unsalted bun is flat and characterless.
- Lemon extractHalf a teaspoon in four cups of flour is a background note, not a lemon bun. Grated zest gives a cleaner result if you prefer.
- ShapingClover-leaf rolls are three small balls set in one cup of a greased muffin tin. Divide the dough into roughly 36 pieces for twelve rolls.
- YieldFour cups of flour gives about a dozen and a half small buns or twelve generous clover-leaf rolls.
- Filed oddlyThe page sits under Frozen Desserts, which looks like a sorting error rather than a clue about the dish.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf cookery genre popular in the early twentieth century: pages punched and bound in a ring binder so a housekeeper could file new recipes among the printed ones and reorder the whole book to suit her kitchen. Leaves in such books came loose, got trimmed and ended up under the wrong tab, which may be how a yeast bun came to sit in a chapter on frozen desserts with the top of its ingredient list missing. The dough itself is a standard American enriched sweet dough of the period, raised in two stages by the sponge method, which was widely used alongside straight doughs. Clover-leaf rolls -- three balls baked together in a muffin cup so they pull apart at the table -- were a popular shape in American home baking in this period and remain a fixture of holiday bread baskets.