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Tea Rolls
1 cake compressed yeast 1/2 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1/2 cup lukewarm water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 3 cups sifted flour 2 tablespoons melted lard Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the lukewarm liquid. Add lard (or butter) and half of the flour; beat until smooth; add rest of flour, or enough to make a moderately firm dough, and the salt. Knead thoroughly; roll out and shape as Parker-House rolls. Place in well-greased, shallow baking pans; cover and set to rise in a warm place, free from draft, for about two hours. When light, bake in a hot oven ten minutes.
A plain straight-dough roll with one rise in the pan. The dough is small and quick to handle; the main adjustments are the yeast and the oven.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed (fresh) yeast weighed about 0.6 oz. Substitute one 1/4-oz packet of active dry or instant yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Ten minutes at that heat is right for small rolls; they should be browned on top and sound hollow. Larger rolls will want 12-15 minutes.
- Liquid temperatureScalding was the usual treatment for raw milk, the reason generally given being that it deactivated something in the milk that weakened gluten. Many modern bakers skip it with pasteurized milk and simply warm the milk and water together to about 100-110F.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard gives a tender, slightly savory crumb. Butter works, as the recipe allows, and shortening is a neutral stand-in.
- Salt placementThe salt goes in with the last of the flour rather than the yeast liquid, as it often does in books of this kind. Adding it with the flour from the start is fine and makes the dough easier to season evenly.
- Parker-House shapingRoll the dough about 1/4 inch thick, cut 2 1/2-inch rounds, crease each off-center with the back of a knife, brush with melted butter and fold the smaller flap over the larger. Press the fold lightly so it holds.
- The single riseThere is no bulk fermentation here: the shaped rolls rise in the pan for about two hours. In a modern kitchen at 70F that is roughly right, but judge by look, not clock. They are ready when doubled and slow to spring back.
- YieldThree cups of flour makes roughly 15-18 Parker-House rolls. Best within hours of baking; they stale quickly, being lean.
Parker-House rolls take their name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, where the folded, butter-brushed roll is generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth century; by the time this book was written, the shape had become a standard American technique rather than a hotel specialty, and cookbooks referred to it, as here, without explanation. The recipe belongs to the era when compressed yeast was sold in small foil-wrapped cakes at the grocer and was highly perishable, which is why books of the period commonly call for one cake.