The American Pastry Cook

Jessup Whitehead's American Pastry Cook — the hotel pastry trade's own manual, in hundreds of numbered recipes.

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Genuine Vienna Rolls

4 pounds of flour. 1 quart of milk. 1 ounce of German compressed yeast. 1 ounce of salt. 1 tablespoonful of sugar, Make the milk lukewarm and dissolve the yeast in it. Set sponge at 9 in the morning, at noon add the salt and sugar and make up stiff dough. Let rise till about 4. Then work the dough well on the table by pressing out and folding over.

Roll out the dough in one large sheet as thin as you can, which will be about the thinness of a dinner plate edge; then measuring with your hand cut the dough into strips or bands as wide across as your hand is long. Cut these again into triangular pieces for rolls, not equal sided but long and narrow triangles. Roll these triangular pieces up, beginning at the broad bottom end, and the point will come up in the middle, and there will be a spiral mark around from end to end.

Give each roll a few turns under the hands to smooth it and place it on the baking pan in the form of a crescent-just the shape and size of the new moon. Brush over with water. Let rise in the pans about half an hour and bake about ten minutes.

Some time ago the writer saw a Vienna Model Bakery-so called-begin and flourish awhile, and at last go into bankruptcy in an attempt to introduce and make the above described rolls popular in a community that had but little appreciation of their excellence. For one thing it cost the firm $2.50 per week for compressed yeast alone, to arrive on certain days by express, when they might have made the common kind at a scarcely appreciable cost. The lesson is: German bread for the Germans, but Vienna rolls cannot be forced into the position of favoritism that is held by Parker House or Albany rolls, or split rolls by any other name Make the Vienna shape, however, out of French roll dough. Brush over the sheet of dough with a little melted butter, then roll up the rolls, and after baking they can be unrolled, and the people who eat will admire them.

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