Home › Bread And Bread Making › Flour (Few gratings from rind)
Flour (Few gratings from rind)
Few gratings from rind of lemon Add sugar and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and three-fourths cup flour. Cover and let rise; then add butter, egg well beaten, grated rind of lemon, and one and one-fourth cups flour. Let rise again, roll to one-half inch thickness, shape with small biscuit-cutter, place in buttered pan close together, let rise again, and bake. These rolls may be ready to serve in three hours if one and one-half yeast cakes are used.
This page has been separated from its ingredient list — the heading "Flour (Few gratings from rind)" is the tail of a column of ingredients that ran onto the previous page. The method is complete and workable, but several quantities are simply not on this page, so read it as a sponge-method sweet roll and expect to supply the milk, sugar, salt, butter and egg amounts yourself.
- What is missingOnly the flour is quantified: three-fourths cup into the sponge and one and one-fourth cups afterward, two cups in all. The milk, sugar, salt, butter and egg quantities were on the lost portion of the list. For two cups of flour, a scant cup of milk is the usual proportion in this book's roll doughs, but that is inference, not the original text.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of this period is a small square of compressed fresh yeast, commonly around half to two-thirds of an ounce, though cakes were sold in more than one size. One cake is usually reckoned as roughly equivalent to one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of modern active dry yeast, which would make the "one and one-half yeast cakes" of the fast version something like a tablespoon of dry yeast.
- "Dissolved yeast cake"Compressed yeast was crumbled into a little lukewarm water or milk before use. Instant yeast can go straight into the flour; active dry still wants five minutes in the warm liquid first.
- LukewarmLukewarm here means about blood heat, roughly 100F: neutral on the wrist rather than warm. The lost portion of the ingredient list may have specified scalded and cooled milk, as this book often does elsewhere, but nothing on this page says so.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the instruction is simply "bake." As a modern starting point, small rich rolls of this kind are usually baked around 400F for about 15 minutes, until the tops are an even brown — a suggestion, not the original direction.
- Three risingsSponge, dough, then the shaped rolls in the pan. Each rise is judged by doubling rather than by clock; the three-hour figure with extra yeast is the shortcut, and the flavour is better with one cake and a longer wait.
- Packed close togetherSetting the cut rounds so they touch makes them rise upward and stay soft at the sides — pull-apart rolls, not crusty ones. Spacing them out gives a firmer, drier roll.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith is bitter. Rub the zest into the sugar if you want the perfume to carry further through the crumb.
- YieldTwo cups of flour cut with a small biscuit-cutter gives roughly a dozen to sixteen rolls, filling one 8-inch square pan.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book set its ingredients out in a column above the method, a layout associated with Fannie Farmer's push for orderly, measured recipes, and it is that layout which allows a page break to strand a fragment like this one. The sponge method here — a slack batter of milk, yeast and part of the flour set to rise before the butter and egg go in — was a common way to handle an enriched dough, since fat and sugar noticeably slow yeast. Compressed yeast, sold fresh and perishable from the later nineteenth century onward, was widely available in city kitchens by the 1890s alongside older homemade hop and potato ferments, and it is that convenience the closing note trades on: buy an extra half cake and have hot rolls on the table in an afternoon rather than starting the night before.