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Best Every-day Sort
2 pounds of light dough. 4 ounces of sugar. 4 ounces of butter. 4 yolks of eggs. Large half cup of milk. Flour to make it soft dough.
This is a bakeshop formula rather than a set of instructions: a lean risen bread dough is enriched with sugar, butter, yolks and milk to make a sweet dough for buns, coffee cakes or crumb-topped sheet cakes. Everything hinges on the first line.
- "Light dough" is already-risen bread doughIt means dough taken from the day's bread batch after it has fermented and come up light — not flour and water mixed fresh. Two pounds is roughly the dough from a pound and a quarter of flour, or about an ordinary loaf's worth. Without a live, well-risen base dough the formula has no leavening at all, since no yeast is listed.
- Weights, not cups4 oz sugar is about 1/2 cup; 4 oz butter is one stick. Weigh the dough as well — 2 lb is the anchor the other quantities are pitched against, and eyeballing it throws the whole ratio off.
- "Large half cup of milk" is looseRead it as 4 to 5 fl oz and hold some back. With four yolks and soft butter going in, the dough may need none of it; add milk only if the mass is stiff, and expect to compensate with the "flour to make it soft dough" at the end.
- Working the enrichment inAdd sugar, butter and yolks to the risen dough in stages and knead until each is absorbed. The dough will slacken and look broken before it comes back together; keep going rather than reaching for flour early. Finish with only enough flour to leave a soft, slightly tacky dough.
- Second rise is essentialEnriching knocks the gas out and the fat slows the yeast. Give the dough a full rise again — an hour or more at room temperature, longer than plain bread dough would need — then shape and proof until visibly puffy before baking.
- OvenThe book gives no oven direction and assumes the baker knows. For buns and coffee cakes of this richness something around 375F works; sugar and yolks brown fast, so a hotter oven risks colouring the crust before the crumb sets. Reckon roughly 15-20 minutes for small buns, 25-30 for a sheet cake.
- YieldNot stated. Depending on how much milk and flour go in, the finished dough will come to somewhere around 3 lb — enough for roughly 18 to 20 small buns, or one sheet coffee cake.
Formulas like this one turn on a simple economy: the sweet dough is built on dough already fermenting for the day's bread, which cost the baker nothing extra in time or yeast. That is also why so many printed formulas of the period open with a weight of "light dough" and never mention yeast at all. The heading "Best Every-day Sort" suggests a dough for daily rather than occasional baking. Readers of these books were expected to supply the method themselves; the page gives only the ratio, which was the part worth writing down.