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Luncheon Rolls
½ cup scalded milk 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt 1½ yeast cake dissolved in 2 tablespoons lukewarm water
This is the ingredient column only: the book prints its bread and roll formulas in a shared framework, and the flour and the mixing, rising and baking directions live in the general instructions nearby. Treat the list as a wet base and supply the rest from ordinary roll practice.
- The flour is missingNo flour quantity is given here at all, and the original does not imply one. A dough built on 1½ cups milk plus egg and butter normally takes somewhere near 4½ to 5 cups of flour, but that is an estimate from proportion, not from the book.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of this era was compressed fresh yeast, commonly around 0.6 oz. One and a half cakes is roughly an ounce of fresh yeast, which converts to somewhere between 2¼ and 3 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast. That is a generous amount by modern standards and suits a fast, few-hour rise rather than an overnight one.
- Scalding the milkMilk was scalded because it was raw and unpasteurized; heating also denatures whey proteins that otherwise slacken a dough. With today's milk it is optional. What is not optional is cooling it to about 105-110F before it meets the yeast.
- Order of operationsSugar, butter and salt go into the hot milk; the egg and the dissolved yeast wait until the mixture is lukewarm. Adding either to scalding milk will cook the egg and kill the yeast.
- Butter measureTwo tablespoons melted butter is about 1 oz, or a quarter stick. The wording here reads as melted and then measured, so melt first, then measure.
- OvenNo baking directions are printed with this list. By ordinary roll practice, bake at 400-425F; small rolls take 12-18 minutes and are done when the bottoms are firm and browned.
- YieldThis quantity of liquid makes roughly two dozen small rolls, or eighteen larger ones, depending on shaping.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) was built around this kind of tabulated ingredient list, and it is credited with helping popularize standardized level measurements in American home cooking. "Luncheon rolls" belongs to a family of small, soft, enriched rolls meant for the middle-of-the-day meal, which a late-Victorian household generally served more lightly than dinner. Compressed fresh yeast cakes were perishable and had to be bought often; they spread through American cities in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and gradually displaced the homemade hop-and-potato yeasts that earlier cookbooks explained at length.