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Dinner Rolls
1 cake compressed yeast White of 1 egg 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 3 cups sifted flour 1 level tablespoon sugar 2 level tablespoons lard or butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm milk; add white of egg, beaten until stiff, the flour gradually, the lard or butter, and ast, the salt, keeping the dough soft. Knead lightly, using as little flour in kneading as possible. Place in a well-greased bowl; cover and set to rise in a warm place, free from draft, until double in bulk-about two hours. Mold into rolls the size of walnuts; place in well-greased pans; protect from draft, and let rise one half hour, or until light. Glaze with white of egg, diluted with water. Bake ten minutes in a hot oven.
GRAHAM MUFFINS No. 1 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 cake compressed yeast 4 tablespoons molasses 4 tablespoons melted lard 1 egg 1 cup sifted white flour 1½ cups graham flour 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup chopped nuts Dissolve the yeast and sugar (or molasses) in the lukewarm milk; add lard (or butter) and egg well beaten, then the flour gradually, salt and nuts, beating all the while. Beat until perfectly smooth; cover and set to rise in warm place, free from draft, until lightabout one and a half hours. Have muffin pans well greased and fill about two-thirds full. Cover and let rise to top of pans-about half an hour, and bake twenty minutes in hot oven.
GRAHAM MUFFINS No. 2 Follow the recipe for Egg Muffins, using half graham and half white flour.
Two straightforward yeast-raised breads from a period when a cook bought a moist cake of fresh yeast at the grocer's. The conversions are simple; the timings and the flour handling need a little translation.
- Compressed yeastOne cake was roughly 0.6 oz of fresh cake yeast. Substitute one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast for each cake. Fresh cake yeast is still sold in some markets but is not shelf-stable.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read "hot" as roughly 400-450F. Walnut-sized rolls can bake through in ten minutes at that heat; the muffins take the stated twenty.
- "and ast, the salt"A typesetting error for "and last, the salt." Salt goes in at the end, after the flour, which slows its contact with the yeast.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest common substitute; it absorbs more liquid than white flour, so the muffin batter will look slack at first and thicken as it stands.
- Sugar in the muffinsThe ingredient list gives no sugar, yet the method says "dissolve the yeast and sugar (or molasses)." Use the molasses — four tablespoons is ample food for the yeast.
- Keep the roll dough softThe instruction to use as little flour as possible in kneading is the hinge of the recipe. A stiff dough gives dense, dry rolls; aim for a dough that is just short of sticky.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard gives a tender, slightly savoury crumb. Butter works and is the usual modern choice; shortening is closer in texture to lard but contributes nothing in flavour.
- YieldThree cups of flour makes about 20 to 24 walnut-sized rolls. The muffin batter will fill a standard 12-cup pan two-thirds full and may run to a few cups more.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of American cookery publishing, when a book arrived as punched sheets in a binder so that the housekeeper could add her own pages, remove what she never used, and shuffle the rest. Both recipes depend on commercially compressed yeast, sold in foil-wrapped cakes and delivered fresh; its wide availability from the later nineteenth century onward is what made same-day yeast rolls and yeast-raised muffins practical for a home cook who no longer kept a sourdough or a hop-water starter going. The graham flour in the second recipe carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached unsifted whole-meal bread; by 1900 the term had long outlived his movement and simply meant coarse whole wheat, valued for flavour and thrift more than for moral improvement.