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Flour (Cup sugar teaspoon salt egg)
1 cup milk 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg Yolk one egg ⅛ teaspoon mace 1/4 cup melted butter Scald milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and one and one-half cups flour; beat well, cover, and let rise until light. Add sugar, salt, eggs well beaten, mace, and butter, and enough more flour to knead; knead, let rise again, shape, and bake same as Salad Rolls, or roll in a long strip to one-fourth inch in thickness, spread with butter, roll up like jelly roll, and cut in one-inch pieces. Place pieces in pan close together, flat side down. A few gratings from the rind of a lemon or one-half teaspoon lemon extract may be substituted in place of mace.
A rich sponge-method roll dough — essentially the base for cinnamon-style spiral rolls, flavoured with mace rather than cinnamon. Note first that the printed ingredient list here is incomplete: the milk, yeast and total flour quantities have dropped out of the text, so this reads as a method more than a full formula.
- The missing quantitiesAs printed, only the sugar, salt, eggs, mace and butter are given. Farmer's rich roll doughs of this type generally start from about a cup of scalded milk, one yeast cake, and roughly three to three and a half cups of flour in total, but that is inference, not what the page says. Treat the flour as "enough more to knead" and go by feel.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake was a small compressed cake, sold both fresh and dried in this period; as a rough modern substitution, treat it as about one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in a little of the lukewarm milk rather than adding it dry.
- Why scald the milkScalding was routine with raw milk, and is usually explained as neutralising something in the whey that slackens dough, though the mechanism is not firmly settled. With pasteurised milk it is generally treated as unnecessary; simply warm it to lukewarm, and take care not to add the yeast until it is genuinely below body temperature.
- The sponge stageMilk, yeast and about a cup and a half of flour are beaten and left to "rise until light" — an hour or so, until visibly bubbly and domed. Adding the sugar, egg and butter only afterwards keeps the fat and sugar from slowing the initial ferment.
- MaceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and lighter than nutmeg itself. Half a teaspoon of ground mace in a batch this size is assertive; the lemon rind alternative given at the end is the milder option.
- OvenThe page gives no temperature at all; it defers to Salad Rolls. In modern terms rolls of this kind are usually baked hot, in the region of 400 to 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes until well browned, but that is a modern reading rather than the book's instruction. The spiral pieces, packed close together in the pan, will take the longer end of that range because their sides steam rather than bake.
- Shaping the spiralsRoll to a true quarter inch, no thicker, or the cut pieces unwind and slump. Cutting with a length of thread slipped under the roll and crossed over the top gives cleaner rounds than a knife, which drags the soft dough out of shape.
- YieldWith no milk or flour quantity printed, any yield is guesswork; a batch of this general size would be expected to give roughly two dozen one-inch spirals, enough to fill one baking pan snugly.
Fannie Farmer's bread chapter is organised as a set of variations on a handful of base doughs, which is why this entry reads as a fragment: it assumes the reader knows the Salad Rolls it cross-references and will borrow that method for shaping and baking. The sponge-and-dough approach used here — a loose batter of milk, yeast and part of the flour, left to ferment before the eggs, sugar and butter go in — was standard practice when yeast was less reliable and less vigorous than today's, since it let the cook see the yeast working before committing expensive butter and eggs to the batch. Mace as the default sweet-roll spice is a nineteenth-century American habit that has largely faded; it turns up in Boston Cooking-School recipes for cakes, puddings and rolls, where a later cook would reach for cinnamon or vanilla. The rolled-and-sliced spiral described at the end closely resembles the construction of the cinnamon roll, here left plain with only butter between the layers.