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Hot Dog Rolls
2 CUPS SIFTED FLOUR 2 TEASPOONS BAKING POWDER SALT 4 TABLESPOONS SHORTENING 3/4 CUP MILK Pan-broil wieners until well browned. Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder and salt, and sift again. Cut in shortening. Add milk gradually, stirring until soft dough is formed. Turn out on slightly floured board and knead 30 seconds or long enough to shape. Roll 1/8 inch thick and cut in 2-inch squares. Cut wieners in half; place half in center of each square. Fold dough over wiener, pinch edges together, and shape into roll, leaving ends open. Place seam-side down on ungreased baking sheet, bake in hot oven 12-15 minutes. Makes 3 dozen rolls.
A biscuit dough wrapped around browned wiener halves — the mid-century picnic ancestor of the pigs-in-blankets everyone still makes. Two details carry the recipe: the wieners are cooked before wrapping, and the oven has to be genuinely hot.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this is roughly 400-425F. A slack oven risks the thin dough drying before it rises.
- Salt quantityThe ingredient list gives salt with no measure. For 2 cups of flour, something in the range of 1/2 to 1 teaspoon is usual in a baking-powder dough of this type.
- Sifted, then measured"Sift flour once, measure" means sifting before spooning into the cup — it yields noticeably less flour by weight than scooping unsifted. If you work by weight, treat 2 cups sifted all-purpose as about 8 oz / 225 g.
- Shortening4 tablespoons is 1/4 cup. Vegetable shortening is what the recipe intends; cold butter also works, but cut it in while still firm.
- Pan-broilThis just means frying in a dry or barely greased skillet until the skins brown and blister. Doing it first is the point: the dough bakes in 12-15 minutes, which is not long enough to heat a raw sausage through, and modern wieners are already fully cooked anyway.
- Rolling and cuttingAn eighth of an inch is thin for biscuit dough and it will want to shrink back. Roll on a lightly floured board, cut the 2-inch squares with a knife or bench scraper rather than a cutter, and re-roll scraps only once.
- YieldThree dozen rolls means 18 wieners cut in half — roughly two standard packages. Scale the dough down by half if you want a single package's worth.
- ServingBest warm from the sheet. They reheat acceptably in a moderate oven, but the crust never returns to its first crispness.
Hot Dog Rolls belongs to the era when baking powder had made a quick biscuit dough the default wrapper for almost anything savory: the same two-cups-flour, two-teaspoons-baking-powder formula shows up in period cookbooks as shortcake, dumplings, cobbler topping and pinwheels, adapted by whatever was folded into it. The wiener itself, sold in American cities from the late nineteenth century onward and served in a bun by the early twentieth, was cheap, pre-cooked and widely available, which made it a natural filling for such a dough.