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Imitation French Rolls, with Baking Powder
"Vienna Rolls." 2 pounds or quarts of flour. 4 heaping teaspoonfuls of powder. 2 heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar. 1 heaping teaspoonfuls of salt. 4 tablespoonfuls of butter or lard, melted. 2 yolks of eggs. 1 large pint of milk. See directions for biscuit and make this dough same way. After it has stood a few minutes to lose its springiness make into split rolls. Cutting out is the quickest, and best for baking powder dough. See directions for French rolls. Brush over with melted lard in the pans. Let stand 20 minutes to rise, if convenient. Bake as usual.
When a seidlitz, or any effervescent powder is dropped into a glass of water the gas produced rushes to the top and immediately escapes, but if a portion of a raw egg be mixed in the water first, or some dissolved gum arabic, it catches and holds the gas on top in the form of froth, as in soda syrups. The same effect in some degree is observable when an egg is mixed in baking-powder bread. A film is formed that holds the air, the dough may be allowed a few minutes to become lighter, and the rolls are more spongy than if made without. Repetition, if odious to the thorough reader, is unavoidable in a cook book, where people seeking but one article will overlook all else. ow Flake Rolls or Biscuit.
Another way of using powder by working it into the dough. Worth practicing. Very white. 2 pounds or quarts of flour. 4 heaping teaspoonfuls of powder. 1 heaping teaspoonfuls of salt. 2 basting-spoonfuls of melted lard. 1 large pint of milk.
Mix up like biscuit but only put in a fourth part of the powder. Mix the rest with a handful of flour and sprinkle it over the dough every time that it is pressed out to a sheet. Knead long and well. Let stand a while. Cut out thin. They rise.
Two related formulas: quick rolls leavened with baking powder and enriched with yolk, and a second version where the powder is laminated in with dry flour between folds. Both are meant to imitate yeast-raised Vienna rolls in a hotel kitchen with no time to proof dough.
- "2 pounds or quarts of flour"Bakers of the period reckoned a quart of flour at roughly a pound, so this is about 7 to 8 cups of all-purpose flour. Weigh it: 900 g is the safer reading, and the dough should come together soft but not slack.
- A large pint of milkAn American pint is 2 cups; "large" means generously filled, so start with 2 cups and hold another 1/4 cup in reserve. Modern flour hydrates differently from the flour of the period, so judge by feel rather than pouring it all in.
- Heaping spoonfulsA heaping teaspoon is roughly one and a half level teaspoons. Four heaping teaspoons of powder for 8 cups of flour comes out near the low end of modern practice; 6 to 8 level teaspoons of double-acting baking powder is a reliable equivalent. A basting-spoonful in the second recipe is about 2 tablespoons.
- Bake as usualThe book gives no oven temperature. For split rolls of this size a hot oven, around 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are set and lightly coloured, will do. The book assumes you have read its biscuit and French roll directions; treat these as large baking-powder biscuits, not as bread.
- The hinge: do not let the dough sit longThe twenty-minute rest is possible, on the author's own argument, because the yolk film traps the gas. With modern double-acting powder some lift is held in reserve for the oven, but a chemically leavened dough left standing much beyond twenty minutes will lose its rise. Have the oven hot before you cut the rolls.
- Cutting outRoll to about 1/2 inch for the split rolls and press straight down with a floured cutter; twisting seals the edge and the roll will not open. "Split rolls" most likely means creasing each round across the centre with the back of a knife or a dowel and folding it over so it parts cleanly after baking.
- LardBrushing with melted lard, as the recipe directs in the pans, gives the pale, tender crust the recipe is after. Butter works and tastes better, but browns faster; use a slightly cooler oven if you use it.
- Snow Flake RollsThe second formula (printed here as "ow Flake Rolls" through a lost initial letter) is a rough lamination: a quarter of the powder goes into the dough, the rest is cut with a handful of flour and dusted over each sheeting. Knead and sheet at least four or five times so the powder is evenly distributed, and cut these thin, about 1/4 inch.
- YieldEight cups of flour makes a large batch, roughly 30 to 36 rolls from a 2 1/2-inch cutter. Halve everything for a household.
Vienna bread was one of the great commercial enthusiasms of late nineteenth-century America, generally traced to the Vienna Bakery at the 1873 Vienna Exposition and the Austrian bakers who exhibited at Philadelphia in 1876; for a generation afterwards "Vienna" on a roll meant a fine, white, spongy crumb with a thin crust, properly the product of a long yeast fermentation and steam. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks working to a clock, and this page is frankly an imitation, standing in the tradition of American chemically leavened quick breads that had spread rapidly since the arrival of commercial baking powders in the 1860s and 70s. The digression about seidlitz powder and gum arabic is characteristic of him: an attempt to explain, in the kitchen-science language available to him, why egg makes a baking-powder dough hold its gas long enough to be shaped and rested. His closing apology for repetition tells you how the book was actually used, by cooks looking up one item at a time rather than reading it through.