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Parker House Rolls
4 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 6 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 tablespoons shortening 1 1/2 cups milk Sift flour, salt and baking powder together. Add melted shortening to milk and add slowly to dry ingredients stirring until smooth. Knead lightly on floured board and roll out one-half inch thick. Cut with biscuit cutter. Crease each circle with back of knife one side of center. Butter the small section and fold larger part well over the small. Place one inch apart in greased pan. Allow to stand 15 minutes in warm place. Brush each with melted butter and bake in moderate oven 15 to 20 minutes.
A baking-powder shortcut version of a roll that is normally made with yeast, from a cookbook published to sell Royal Baking Powder. Treat it as a soft biscuit dough shaped in the Parker House fold.
- The hinge: keep the dough soft and barely workedThere is no yeast here, so all the lift comes from the powder and from steam. Kneading beyond a dozen quick folds develops gluten that a chemical leavener cannot raise, and the rolls turn tough and bready.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only 'moderate oven'; in books of this period that is usually taken as about 350-375F. Set 375F for rolls this size.
- Baking powder quantitySix teaspoons is 2 tablespoons, or 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour. Royal was sold as a cream-of-tartar powder, which releases its gas faster than today's double-acting types. With a modern tin, 4 teaspoons should be enough; the full amount may leave an aftertaste.
- The 15-minute restWith modern double-acting powder this rest is harmless and lets the shaped rolls relax. With an old-style tartrate powder it would have cost some lift.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means lard or vegetable shortening. Melted butter works and tastes better, though the crumb may be slightly less tender.
- FlourModern all-purpose may be stronger than the flour originally used. If the dough feels tight, add milk a tablespoon at a time; it should be soft enough to roll but not sticky.
- ShapingCut with a 2 1/2-inch cutter, press the crease off-centre so one half is clearly larger, and fold the big half over. Buttering the small section is what keeps the two layers from sealing, so the roll opens along the fold.
- YieldRoughly two dozen rolls from a 2 1/2-inch cutter, depending on rerolling. Best eaten within an hour of baking, as quick-bread rolls stale faster than yeasted ones.
The folded roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in 1855; the shape is generally traced to the hotel's bakery in the second half of the nineteenth century, though the frequently repeated story of an angry baker flinging unfinished dough into the oven is folklore rather than record. The original was a rich yeasted dough, and its appearance here without yeast says a good deal about the book it comes from, a promotional cookbook from a baking powder company, where the appeal of a hot roll that needed no yeast was the whole point. The result is closer to a folded biscuit than to the hotel's roll, but the fold and the buttered seam carried the name.