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English Tea Cakes

2 pounds of light bread dough. 12 ounces of sugar. 12 ounces of butter. 4 eggs. 1/2 pound of flour to work in. 1/2 pound of currants. Takes about 5 hours time. Mix all the ingredients with the dough in the middle of the day. Let rise till 4. Then beat the dough well with a spoon--it is a little too soft to handle--and spread it thin on buttered pie plates. Rise about an hour. Bake, and split open and butter them. One teaspoonful of carraway seeds will suit better than the currants in some countries. Where the children have been raised on "Abernethy biscuits," to wit; and know what carraway seeds are. In contrary situations it hurts a house, and the cook's sensibilities to have people picking the seeds out, thinking they are dirt.

Hotel "French Rolls' An Inquiry into their Origin.

Dishes worthy of special attention had their name and quality ceremoniously proclaimed.--Philosophical History of Cookery.

An uncommon dish was introduced to the sound of the flute, and the servants were crowned with flowers. In the time of supper the guests were entertained with music and dancing, * * * but the more sober had only persons to read or repeat select passages from books--Roman Antiquities The kinds of rolls shown in the cut, which are understood to be par excellence French rolls, are of chiefest interest to us in hotels, for the two reasons that everybody likes them--most potent consideration where the aim and end of all endeavor is to please--and that they, at least, appear to be of American origin.

I said as much once to an old and educated Italian cook who had been a great traveler, but he smiled:--"America is too young to have any cookery of her own; you can find a foreign origin for every dish you have. I remember seeing such rolls as those on the tables at restaurants and cafes in Europe, when a boy, over fifty years ago" Yet at last this was but a conjecture. He could not be sure that what he saw were not the baker's cleft rolls mentioned some pages back, and which have no great merit over ordinary baker's bread. One of the best American domestic cook-books also mentions "the cleft rolls which we so often find on the tables of the city restaurants". And we still remain in ignorance, even if they prove the same, whether they may not have been presented by America to Europe at first. The name, French roll, may be but an American application, as if it had been taken for granted that whatever is admirable in cookery must be French. It is the popular understanding of a split roll or pocket-book shape that can be pulled open hot, and admits a lump of butter within its melting clasp, but never so far as I can find out has been described in any but American books and those domestic. The earliest dated mention of French rolls I have met with in the merely cursory search which such a minor matter justifies, is the following, recently republished in the REPORTER from "Forney's Progress": * * * * "A public resort known as Spring Garden. The hotel attached to the premises was situated on the late site of the Museum, at the corner of Ann street, (New York). In 1760 I find the advertisement of John Elkin, its proprietor, offering to the public, 'breakfast from 7 to 9; tea in the afternoon from 3 to 6; the best of green tea and hot French rolls, pies and tarts drawn from 7 to 9; mead and cakes.'" This shows that French rolls were "the thing" at a date even anterior to the culminating period of modern French cookery, before the revolution. But the French rolls of that advertisement; of the quotation from Savarin at the opening of this book, of the quotation from Bulwer at the head of the next division--the French rolls of the trades-people who buy them hot for breakfast of the bakers in all the European towns are only little round loaves--crowded into the pans so that they rise to a tall shape, and taken from the oven at intervals, kept smoking hot under green baize covers--made a trifle richer than ordinary bakers' bread. The split roll shown in the picture is in all likelihood an American improvement.

In "Quentin Durivard" (chap. IV) Sir Walter Scott gives the most explicit information in this regard. At the breakfast--"There was a delicate ragout, with just that petit point de l' ail which Gascons love and Scottishmen do not hate. There was the most exquisite white bread, made into little round loaves called boules, (whence the bakers took their French name Boulangers) of which the crust was so inviting that, even with water alone it would have been a delicacy. But the water was not alone" The probability that split rolls are an American improvement is strengthened by the apparant absence of any mention of them in the best foreign cook books. Seeing how suitable the shape shown in the cut is for sandwiches one would have expected Jules Gouffe (about 1860) to adopt it instead of this circumstantial direction for "rolls with foiegras;" he says, "Take 24 small French rolls of an oval shape, 2 1/2 inches by 1 1/2, rasp the rolls and slit them open lengthwise without separating them entirely." The Cuisine Classique directs much the same way, to cut off the tops of roll and brioche, (sort of butter rolls) and remove the inside crumb, for sandwiches and timbales. So also the "Modern Cook," (1840) and, later, "Model Cookery," which only directs to make French rolls in long shapes placed side by side. A number of lesser works either ignore French rolls a together or treat the making up in round balls as a matter of course.

On the contrary, the writer of these lines worked with a man, A. Nelson by name, making both the shapes shown, as far back a 1850, on one of the old-time, high-living floating palaces of New Orleans, and found them then as ever since the most popular of all. The man's home was at Nashville, Tenn. Judging from his age and experience and his unconciousness of there being any novelty in this sort of rolls it seems fair to assume that he had been used to them for ten or fifteen years before. Some four or five years after I saw the same in Cincinnati and Evansville, under the name of Parker House rolls Since then in numerous American publications they may be found called by those and other names--Tremont House rolls for one.

Mr. Charles Wood, for an ordinary lifetime baker at the Tremont House, Boston, drawn out in reply to a newspaper paragraph crediting him with the origination of French rolls in this country--meaning the split rolls shown in the cut--only dates back the making of his pattern about twenty-six years, and explains that Mr. Paran Stevens required him to make rolls like some he had seen on a European tour Mr. Wood does not in his published letter say that the rolls he produced were the same as the European, but only that after several months trial he produced what satisfied Mr. Paran Stevens--who may still have had in mind the French brioche, or even the cleft rolls whose texture is in flakes and coils, and their merit being individual loaves. It appears that the general hotel and traveler's understanding of the term is by no means universal. Let us make rolls French, according to the European understanding, and never so good, if they be round, tall, oval, oblong or twisted, some person will send them back, and looking at the bill-of fare will say bring him some French rolls. And another great lover of bread will say, "these are all very well, but you ought to see the French rolls they have at--" some other house. Nevertheless a letter from Russia published in the REPORTER two years ago remarked how much better the delicate soft rolls there were "than the French, which are nearly all crust."

These Russian rolls were doubtless the same as our "French." Puzzled by these diverse ideas I wrote to the Royal Baking Powder Co., who had exhibited the making of "Vienna Rolls" with powder at the Centennial, in Philadelphia, and the president kindly answered with drawings showing for French rolls, the cleft crusty loaves of the bakers--directions for making which bave already been given at length--and their Vienna rolls were in shape like those, plain ones, in our picture. There is a remark in one of the higher-class cook-books recently published, that hot breads for breakfast and supper are but little used except in the West. Accordingly our hotel French rolls are not described in it at all. And yet the Parker and Tremont Houses are in the East, and Boston people everywhere are exhibiting their rolls to the heathen with pride. Are those Boston hotels to be regarded as deriving much of their fame from the introduction of this peculiar institution where before it was unknown? As an example of how a thing may have various names in different localities: Last year a Canadian hotel steward who went West and conducted a first-class house, well knew the merit and importance of fine rolls, yet so little acquainted with their usual name that he had them printed on his bill-of-fare "buns." So without really appearing on the bill at all, the split rolls experienced an increasing demand from three or four hundred to over eight hundred at a meal, and so it went till about the time the third batch of supper and breakfast bills were to be printed, when the pastrycook ventured to intimate that "buns" were very rarely called for, but the "no names"--the French rolls which did not appear at all upon the bill were having a tremendous run all the same. Then the name was printed right. It is not to be inferred that the hotel steward was ignorant, but only that these rolls were not familiarly known in the section whence he came.

Perhaps nine out of ten of the people outside the circulating intelligence of our hotels, if asked the meaning of the term "pocket-book roll," would guess it to mean a roll of five and ten dollar bills--sometimes called greenbacks, and sometimes Spinnerisms. It is no such thing, but a roll just like those in our cut, It is a local domestic name for the hotel French roll. A Western author, Miss Farman, of Michigan, so describes it and the method of making, in the "Cooking Club of Tu-what Hollow," in the children's Wide Awake, and speaks as if the appellation were one well known and understood among home folk, although so strange to our hotel bill-of-fare. However, it must be owned, our rolls are the more like a pocket-book, (with silk or satin covers) the better they are made; for there is more sense in having a somewhat flat shape, not too thick for a bite, than the taller form that is neither loaf nor slice Through all the foregoing, and many other considerations too tedious to mention, I have arrived at the suppositions that French rolls, as understood by commercial travelers and other hotel frequenters, are of American origin; that they were evolved out of the competition between Boston hotels; that they were first a specialty of the Parker House, that thence they spread rapidly to wherever there was good living, because the travelling people went bragging about them, and that they have found their way like pilgrims and strangers into the domestic world, contentedly taking any pet name that may have been thrust upon them. All of which is respectfully submitted. However that may prove to be, I would advise that rolls of any other shape be denominated on the bill-of-fare simply hot rolls, and the term French roll, in American hotels, should always be understood to mean a split roll like these shown.

French Rolls. Parker House, Tremont House, or Pocket-book Rolls. Sacred heaven! what masticators! what bread!--Quentin Durward. "Well," said Mr. Copperas who, occupied in finishing the buttered cake, had hitherto kept silence, "I must be off. Tom,--I mean De Warens,--have you stopt the coach?" "Yees, sir." "And what coach is it?" "It be the Swallow, sir." "O very well. And now Mr. Brown, having swallowed in the roll, I will een roll in the Swallow--Ha, ha, ha! At any rate," thought Mr. Copperas as he descended the stairs, "he has not heard that before."--Bulwer--The Disowned. Perhaps we, behind the scenes in hotels, take different views of what is important, from the majority of people. With the matter in hand, for instance. Individuals, or a family, may never even see a hot roll on their table, and yet never realize how unfortunate they are. The "sour grapes" philosophy may help them, and they believe hot rolls are not wholesome, anyway. It is really of no consequence in isolated cases. But when a whole hotel full of people show a decided liking for rolls, so that they could not well enjoy a meal' without, does not the increased size of the matter justify our case? There are lean times, too, in hotels, when the meat is poor, game out of market and spring lamb not come in; when poultry almost disappears and oysters are no more; neither choice vegetables nor new fruits have arrived. Then the regulars grow discontented and seek new pasture--at the restaurants where sliced baker's bread is set before them--at the opposition hotel where, whatever else they may try to have, the rolls are unwholesome wads of dough, or dry and unpalateable biscuits and grimy cakes. Then the regulars return to their proper homes like good boys, and say it is all very well over there, but they don't have good rolls--and with such rolls as these they can almost dispense with everything else. In such cases may not the pastry-cook claim a right to loom up tall and exalt his trade?