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Swedish Rolls
Use recipe for Salad Rolls. Roll to one-fourth inch thickness, spread with butter, and sprinkle with two tablespoons sugar mixed with one-third teaspoon cinnamon, one-third cup stoned raisins finely chopped, and two tablespoons chopped citron; roll up like jelly roll, and cut in three-fourths inch pieces. Place pieces in pan close together, flat side down. Again let rise, and bake in a hot oven. When rolls are taken from oven, brush over with white of egg slightly beaten, diluted with one-half tablespoon water; return to oven to dry egg, and thus glaze top. 1 cup milk
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the Salad Rolls dough from the preceding page, and the trailing "1 cup milk" is a fragment of that base recipe that has drifted onto the end. Treat it as a filled, sliced sweet roll in the cinnamon-bun family.
- The base doughSalad Rolls is the base; look that recipe up rather than guessing. The stray "1 cup milk" at the end points to a milk-based dough, and any lightly sweetened, enriched milk bread dough will behave much the same way; the exact proportions of butter, sugar, yeast and flour are not given on this page.
- Yeast conversionA cake of compressed yeast is usually equated with about 2¼ teaspoons of modern active dry or instant yeast. Some of Farmer's bread doughs call for only a quarter or half cake with a long overnight rise; if you substitute a full packet, expect the rises to run an hour or so rather than all night.
- "A hot oven"For rolls this means 400–425°F. Small enriched rolls take 15 to 20 minutes at that heat; the sugar and raisins brown fast, so check the bottoms.
- CitronCandied citron — the thick peel of the Citrus medica, sold in blocks around the holidays. If you cannot find it, candied orange peel is the nearest substitute in texture and bitterness; ordinary mixed "fruitcake peel" is sweeter and softer.
- Stoned raisinsRaisins were still commonly sold seeded, which is why the recipe specifies stoning them by hand, though seedless varieties were becoming available by this date. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and a brief soak in warm water keeps them from scorching and drying the crumb.
- Cutting and packingThree-quarter-inch slices are thin; a length of dental floss or thread slipped under the roll and pulled tight cuts cleaner than a knife and does not squash the spiral. Set them cut side down with sides just touching so they rise into each other and stay soft at the seams.
- The egg glazeThe unusual step here is glazing after baking, not before — the hot rolls come out, get brushed with thinned egg white, and go back in for a minute or two to set it. That gives a clear, hard shine rather than the deep brown of an egg wash baked from the start. Keep the return trip short so the rolls do not dry.
- YieldA one-cup-of-milk dough rolled a quarter inch thick and cut at three-quarters of an inch gives perhaps 18 to 24 rolls, depending on how long the rolled cylinder is.
"Swedish rolls" in an American cookbook of the 1890s is less a documented Scandinavian import than a period label for a sweet spiral roll -- the same construction that Sweden knows as kanelbullar, though the cinnamon bun's rise to a Swedish national fixture is generally dated to the decades after the First World War. What Fannie Farmer is describing is simply a rich roll dough rolled up jelly-roll fashion with sugar, spice and dried fruit; candied citron was common in festive Anglo-American baking, but it also turns up in Nordic holiday breads, so it points neither way very firmly. The entry also shows how the Boston Cooking-School book was built: one master dough, then a column of short variations that each assume the reader has the base recipe in front of her. That habit of cross-reference, along with Farmer's insistence on level measurements, is what made the book usable by cooks who had never learned bread at anyone's elbow.