Richest
3 cups of sweet milk. 1 cup of yeast. 6 ounces of butter, melted. 6 yolks of eggs. 3 ounces of sugar. 1 ounce of salt. All the flour it will take up--or about 5 pounds.
A large proportion of yeast may be used in winter.
The dough ought not to want coaxing under a stove to rise. Our yeast made from good stock brings the dough up fast enough anywhere in a warm room, and bread thus easily raised is always the best and sweetest. Half yeast to half milk or water is better than too little.
If these pocket-book shaped rolls are such general favorites, why are they not universally adopted and found everywhere? The directions a little way back numbered 1 to 7 explain the reason why.
These rolls are very tedious to make and take up one person's time from all other kinds of bread. When business is dull the pastrycook makes them in great perfection for the few people, but as soon as the house begins to fill up the work begins to crowd and the tedious split rolls are discontinued just at the time when they are really needed and would do most good. The remedies are, to leave out the unimportant kinds and give the time to these, and where it is impossible to give these rolls the 5 or 6 handlings, rather than abandon, cut them out instead. To do this, roll the dough to a sheet as if for biscuit. Brush over with melted lard. Cut out and double over. French rolls made without yolk of egg will come out the smoothest-looking when baked, if made that way.
This is a hotel bakery formula for rich split rolls — the "pocket-book" shape now generally called Parker House — written for a cook working with a wet yeast of his own keeping. The quantities scale to about 5 lb of flour, so plan on cutting it down.
- The cup of yeastThis is liquid yeast (barm or a stock ferment kept in the bakeshop), not dry granules, and it functions as both leaven and part of the liquid. There is no honest one-to-one conversion; if you want to work from this formula, treat the cup as roughly a cup of active liquid levain and adjust the milk, or substitute commercial yeast and add a cup of milk in its place, accepting that the flavor will be flatter and that the quantity of dry yeast is guesswork — a couple of teaspoons is on the low side for 5 lb of flour.
- Scale it downFive pounds of flour with 3 cups of milk yields something in the range of 60 to 80 rolls. A quarter batch — about 1 1/4 lb flour, 3/4 cup milk, 1 1/2 oz butter, 1 or 2 yolks, 3/4 oz sugar, 1/4 oz salt weighed — is manageable in a domestic mixer.
- Salt and sugar by weightOne ounce of salt to 5 lb flour is about 1.25 percent, on the low side by modern standards. Weigh it rather than measuring by spoon, since an ounce of coarse salt fills far more volume than an ounce of fine.
- "All the flour it will take up"The author expects you to judge by feel rather than by a fixed weight. Hold back the last several ounces of flour and add only as needed; flours vary in how much liquid they absorb.
- The five or six handlingsThe hinge of the recipe. These rolls appear to owe their layered, pull-apart texture to repeated knocking back and folding of the dough between rises; the shortcut he offers — roll to a sheet, brush with fat, cut rounds, fold each in half — produces a decent roll with far less labor.
- OvenHe gives none. Rich egg-and-butter rolls of this size bake at 400 to 425F for 12 to 18 minutes, until deep gold. Brush with melted butter as they come out.
- Rising temperatureHe objects to needing to coax the dough under a stove, not to a fast rise as such: he claims good yeast raises the dough fast enough in an ordinary warm room, and that bread so raised is the best. Any comfortably warm room temperature answers to what he describes.
- Yolks and appearanceThe closing note claims rolls made without yolk bake up smoothest-looking. He does not say why; yolk-rich doughs do tend to color faster. Leave the yolks out for a paler, smoother crust, or keep them for a richer, more tender crumb.
"Pocket-book" rolls take their name from the shape: a round of dough creased and folded over on itself like a folding wallet, so it opens in two halves at the table. The form is traditionally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston, though that attribution rests on hotel lore rather than documentation. The digression here is the most revealing part of the entry — the author is not really teaching a dough so much as arguing a labor point, that split rolls get dropped from the bill of fare precisely when the house is full and the pastrycook has no hands to spare. Note too that he keeps his own liquid yeast "from good stock" and takes pride in how fast it works, at a period when commercial compressed yeast was also on the market.