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Cinnamon or Fruit Rolls
Make dough as for Standard Biscuit, only using more shortening. Roll out flat into circle or square, spread with good butter and sprinkle with spice and sugar to suit taste. Roll into cylinder form and slice vertically. Bake in pans, same as biscuit. Seeded raisins, or currants, can be added if desired. ALUME 4 cups sifted flour
This is a baking-powder biscuit dough treated as a sweet roll — quick, no yeast, no rising time. The original assumes you have already read the Standard Biscuit entry a few pages earlier, so most of the working detail is missing here.
- The base doughA "Standard Biscuit" of this period was typically flour, baking powder, salt, shortening and enough milk to make a soft dough, but this page does not repeat the proportions and the book's own Standard Biscuit entry is not before us. "More shortening" simply means a richer dough that rolls thinner more easily.
- The stray lineThe "ALUME 4 cups sifted flour" at the end does not belong to the instructions and looks like a stray fragment, most likely from an adjacent entry. Ignore it; it cannot be taken as evidence of the flour quantity for this recipe.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction beyond "same as biscuit." Biscuits of this era generally went into what was called a quick or hot oven, roughly 425-450F in modern terms; since sugar and butter in the filling brown fast, the lower end is the safer choice.
- "Slice vertically"This most likely means cutting the log crosswise into rounds rather than splitting it lengthwise. Cut about 1 inch thick, a batch of this size should give roughly a dozen rolls.
- ShorteningAt this period this would mean lard or butter; hydrogenated vegetable shortening did not reach the market until after 1910. Cold butter cut into the flour gives the best flavour and flakiest layers; work it to coarse crumbs and stop.
- Handle it cold and fastThe hinge of any biscuit dough. Knead only until it holds together, roll to about 1/4 inch, and get it into a hot oven before the butter in the filling softens into the dough.
- Spice and sugar"To suit taste" is unhelpfully vague; about 1/2 cup sugar and 2 teaspoons cinnamon for a 4-cup batch is a workable ratio. Currants and seeded raisins were the standard dried fruit of the period — "seeded" simply means the pips removed, which modern raisins already are.
- PansSet the rolls close together in a shallow pan so they support each other and stay tall. Baked on a flat sheet with space between, they spread and dry out.
Sweet rolls built on biscuit dough rather than yeast dough are a product of the chemical-leavening era: once reliable baking powder was widely sold in the second half of the nineteenth century, a cook could put a cinnamon roll on the table in a fraction of the time yeast dough demanded. Cookbooks of the period leaned hard on that convenience, and the cross-referencing here — "make dough as for Standard Biscuit" — is typical of their economy, treating one master dough as the parent of a dozen variations. The choice of currants or seeded raisins reflects what a household pantry actually held: dried fruit kept, fresh fruit did not, and raisins still commonly arrived with their seeds in, a chore that is generally said to have faded as seedless varieties became more common in the American market.