French Rolls
For about 60 split rolls. 3 large cups of water or milk. 1 large cup of yeast. 1 ounce of salt. (A heaping tablespoon.) 2 ounces of sugar. 2 ounces of lard or butter. 4 pounds of flour Set sponge at 8 in the morning with half the flour. At 12 or 1 add all the enriching ingredients and work up stiff.
All the detailed instructions for making the dough and kneading it the right away have been given already under the head of common bread. After the 4 o'clock kneading proceed to make the dough into rolls. Persons in practice find it quickest to pull of pieces of dough of right size and mould them up instantly. 1. Others cut off strips of dough, roll them in lengths and cut these up in roll sizes. 2. Mould them up round with no flour on the board and only a dust on the hands, and place them in regular rows on the table--the smoothest side down 3. Take a little rolling pin--it looks like a piece of new broom handle--and roll a depression across the middle of each, as in the cut. 4. Brush these over with the least possible melted lard or butter, using a tin-bound varnish brush for the purpose. 5. Double the rolls, the two buttered sides together as seen in the cut below, and place them in the pans diagonally, with plenty of room so they will not touch. 6. Brush over the tops of the rolls in the pans with the least possible melted lard again and set them to rise about an hour--less or more according to temperature. 7. Bake in a hot oven, about 10 minutes. Brush over with clear water when done.
Keep baking at short intervals and keep hot without drying out. The particular feature of these rolls, it is seen, is the folded shape, allowing them to be opened when done, and this is the result of brushing over with butter. Rolls placed close together in pans will part clean and entirely separate wherever they have been so greased between in the making. The preceding receipt producing fine French rolls, good enough for anything, the next are no-names. The addition of eggs and butter does not make a vast difference, but still makes them creamy colored and crisp. And if a body choose to name either of the two for some favorite hotel, need any other body kick? Possibly their name may be Parker, Tremont, Revere, Brunswick, French, Clarendon, St. James or Windsor rolls. Who shall decide or prove what they are?
No-Name Rolls. No. 1. 3 large cups of milk. 1 large cup of yeast. 3 ounces of sugar. 3 yolks of eggs. 4 ounces of butter, melted. 1 ounce of salt. All the flour the fluids will take up, or 4 1/2 pounds Make up either sponge or stiff dough, as may be most convenient. The latter way is best at night. All the ingredients may be put in at once, but the milk should not be made too warm in summer, when the dough has to be made 12 hours before wanted.
No-Name Rolls. No. 2.
A bakeshop formula written for a man working with a scale, a bench and a wood-fired oven, scaled for sixty rolls. The quantities halve and quarter cleanly, and the shaping is the whole point of the recipe.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour is roughly 14 to 15 cups and yields about 60 folded rolls. A quarter batch (1 lb flour, about 3/4 cup liquid, 1/4 oz salt, 1/2 oz each sugar and fat) gives 15 and fits a home oven.
- That cup of yeast"1 large cup of yeast" is a cup of liquid yeast or barm, a home-kept ferment with no measurable strength by modern standards; there is no honest gram conversion. For a 4 lb flour batch, work instead from about 2 teaspoons instant yeast, and expect to judge the sponge by its rise rather than by the clock.
- Weigh the saltOne ounce of salt to four pounds of flour is 28 g, about 1.5 percent — correct for bread. The parenthetical "heaping tablespoon" holds only for fine table salt; coarse kosher salt needs closer to two tablespoons to reach the same weight.
- The day's timetableSponge at 8 a.m. with half the flour, enrichments and the rest of the flour at noon or one, a kneading at four, shaping after. In a modern kitchen at 70F the sponge will be ready in three to four hours; in a warm summer kitchen it can blow out in two, which is why the later No-Name recipe warns against warm milk.
- A hot ovenProbably in the region of a modern 425 to 450F, though the book gives no figure, only "hot oven." Ten minutes is consistent with that heat for rolls of this size.
- The hinge: grease between the foldsThe depression rolled across the middle and the film of melted butter or lard inside the fold are what let the baked roll open cleanly. Skimp on neither, and note that the recipe twice specifies "the least possible" melted fat.
- Brushing with waterWater on the crust straight from the oven softens it and gives a faint gloss. Do it while the rolls are still hot; the recipe's own direction is simply to keep them hot without drying out.
- The No-Name variantThree yolks and four ounces of butter to 4 1/2 lb flour is a light enrichment — it colors the crumb and crisps the crust rather than making a brioche. "All the flour the fluids will take up" means mix to a stiff, slightly tacky dough; hold back the last cup or two of the 4 1/2 lb.
The folded, butter-seamed roll described here is the shape American hotels made famous, and the author knows it. The wry list of possible names (Parker, Tremont, Revere, Clarendon, Windsor) is a jab at the trade habit of christening an ordinary dough after whichever grand house served it. The one that stuck was the Parker House roll, generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston in the later nineteenth century, though as this passage cheerfully admits, the technique was common bakeshop property and no one could prove ownership. What makes the page useful is the mechanics: the little rolling pin "like a piece of new broom handle," the tin-bound varnish brush pressed into service as a pastry brush, and the observation that greased dough parts clean wherever fat has touched fat. That is a working baker's knowledge, written down for other bakers rather than for housewives.