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Rye Rolls
4 cups rye flour 1 teaspoon salt 6 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 1/2 cups milk 1 tablespoon shortening Sift together dry ingredients; add milk and melted shortening. Knead on floured board; shape into rolls. Put into greased pans and allow to stand in warm place 20 minutes. Bake in moderate oven 25 to 30 minutes.
A quick bread dressed as a yeast roll: chemical leavening, no proofing, on the table in under an hour. Rye behaves nothing like wheat, and that governs almost every decision here.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F and have it fully preheated before the rolls go in. Chemically leavened dough gets its lift in the first few minutes; a cold start wastes it.
- Don't knead it like bread doughRye has little gluten-forming protein and a great deal of pentosan gum, so the dough turns slack and sticky rather than smooth and springy. Work it just long enough to bring it together and shape it, perhaps a minute. Extended kneading gains nothing and knocks out gas.
- The 20-minute standLittle will visibly happen; with chemical leavening this functions mostly as a rest, though the direction to keep it in a warm place suggests the book hoped for some lift. Royal in this era was a cream-of-tartar powder that reacted quickly on wetting, so the pause would have cost some lift; a modern double-acting powder holds back a good part of its gas until the oven, which makes the wait less of a loss.
- Baking powder quantitySix teaspoons to four cups of flour is a teaspoon and a half per cup, at the upper end of normal but not out of range for a heavy, low-gluten flour. Sift it thoroughly with the rye or you may get bitter pockets.
- Which ryeLight or medium rye flour gives the closest result to what the book intends. Whole dark rye or pumpernickel meal drinks far more liquid and bakes dense; if that is what you have, expect to add milk beyond the 1 1/2 cups.
- Hydration is approximateRye absorbs water unpredictably depending on grind and freshness, so treat the milk as a starting point. Aim for a dough that is tacky and just holdable, not pourable and not stiff.
- Flouring the boardUse rye or a little wheat flour for dusting, and keep it light. Excess dry flour worked into an already low-gluten dough makes the rolls crumbly.
- Yield and donenessExpect twelve to sixteen rolls from this quantity. They will not brown deeply; go by a firm crust and a hollow sound when tapped underneath rather than colour, and eat them the day they are made.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that shaped American home baking more than most cookbooks did: the free promotional booklet issued by a leavening manufacturer, in which every recipe calls for the sponsor's product by name. Royal was a cream-of-tartar baking powder, and its pamphlets seem to have suggested that a competent cook need not keep yeast or wait on a rise. Rye rolls are a good demonstration of the argument. Rye had long been a staple grain in Northern and Eastern European baking, where it was normally handled with a sour starter over many hours because rye's enzymes and gums demand acidity to bake well. Substituting baking powder sidesteps all of that and produces something honest but different: a plain, dense, faintly tangy roll that tastes of the grain rather than of fermentation, made between one meal and the next.