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Practice Makes Perfect

Pastry cooks and bakers wishing their French rolls to open up tall and lean backwards, only touch a streak of melted lard on one side of the depressed piece of dough, just where the lips, when the roll is doubled, meet, and none on the top. This gives the roll a start to open without quite making a split roll of it. Different stewards and bosses having different notions about how these things should be it is often difficult for a young man, however willing and capable, to get a foothold with them without the knowledge of just such variations of method as the above.

Sorry there should be such a thing as a warmed over roll in the world, but there will always happen to be whole pans of the nicest rolls left over, and somebody will always want breakfast at four in the morning and expect hot bread. The very best way to warm over rolls, so that none but the most critical can tell them from fresh baked, is this: Wet a clean cloth in clean water-half a flour sack, for instance-and wring it out. Lay this over your cold rolls and set them in the oven. In about five minutes, or when the cloth is dry, the rolls will be warmed through and almost as good as new. Never, if it can be avoided, let the rolls stay in pans over night-it soils the bottom crust. Turn them out to dry.

If your iron pails soil the crust of the steamed brown bread, it can be prevented by lining them with manilla paper, lightly brushed over with melted lard. The loaves come out looking as nice as cake.

By the way, we forgot to put the cross mark on the hot cross buns. It has no use, however, except once a year, on good Friday, to enable British children to make a few pennies by selling them, perpet uating some old custom, nobody seems to know for a certainty what.

A cross mark cut on the buns as they are placed in the pans will remain and show; but if you let the buns rise half light enough, then with a chopping knife cut down deep, and let the buns finish rising, the depression will remain and make the buns appear to be in four parts. Those bun-sellers make the "one-a-penny-buns" a little richer than the "two-a-penny-buns;" and they have to be a little larger, too, or else when the one-a-penny-two-a-penny-hot-cross-buns are all in a basket together, they wouldn't know 'tother from which, you know.