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Potato Rolls
1 cup flour, 1 cup mashed potato, 3/4 cup lard, 1 cup sweet milk, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 eggs beaten, 1 tsp. salt, 1 cake compressed yeast dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water. Scald milk, cool to lukewarm, add to flour and mix well. Add lard melted, sugar, potato and eggs, then yeast. Let stand in warm place until light (about 2 hours), then add 1 quart flour and let rise again. Make into rolls using as little flour as possible. Let rise again and bake in quick oven. The dough may be kept in refrigerator and portions used daily for hot fresh rolls.
— Mrs. H. P. Frost
A rich refrigerator dough built on a potato sponge, of a kind that was standard in American home baking before commercial dinner rolls. The proportions work as written; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- The potato is the pointUse plain mashed potato with no butter, milk, salt or seasoning in it, and add it while still warm rather than fridge-cold. The starch holds moisture, which is what keeps these rolls soft for days and lets the dough sit in the refrigerator without going stiff and dry.
- Compressed yeastOne cake was about 0.6 oz of fresh yeast. Substitute one packet of active dry or instant yeast, 2 1/4 teaspoons, dissolved in the 1/4 cup of warm water as directed.
- Sweet milk, and scalding"Sweet milk" means fresh milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk also kept in the kitchen. Scalding was held to deal with something in raw milk that weakened gluten -- the usual modern explanation points to whey proteins rather than enzymes -- and it also pasteurized the milk. With today's milk it is generally held unnecessary, though heating and cooling to lukewarm does no harm and speeds the sponge.
- A quick ovenUsually glossed as somewhere around 400-450F. For enriched rolls with this much sugar, work at the lower end, about 425F, for roughly 12-18 minutes depending on size, or they will brown before the centers set.
- Flour quantitiesThe initial cup goes into the sponge; the quart added later is about 4 cups, near a pound. "As little flour as possible" when shaping is the instruction that matters most, since this is a slack, sticky dough and extra bench flour is what turns it heavy.
- Lard3/4 cup, melted. Butter or shortening substitutes by volume; butter will brown the crust faster and add flavor the original did not have.
- The refrigerator methodAfter the second rise, the dough keeps covered and chilled for about three days. Pull off what you need, shape, and let it come to room temperature and rise until puffy, which takes considerably longer than the warm-kitchen rise the recipe assumes.
- YieldAbout two to two and a half dozen rolls from the full batch.
Potato in bread dough was thrift and technique at once: in a period when yeast was less reliable and flour varied batch to batch, boiled potato gave the yeast easy sugars and produced a dependably soft, long-keeping loaf. The refrigerator dough note at the end marks the recipe as relatively modern for its type, since keeping a bowl of enriched dough on hand for daily baking depended on having reliable cold storage in the kitchen, whether an icebox or a mechanical refrigerator. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement, and sold to raise funds; the recipes were solicited from members and printed under their married names, which is why this one arrives credited to Mrs. H. P. Frost rather than to any professional authority.