Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Dinner Rolls
Dinner Rolls
White of one egg 1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled Place in well-greased, shallow pans one inch apart. Cover and let rise until light-about three-quarters of an hour.
Bake ten minutes in hot oven. 1 tablespoonful sugar 3 cups sifted flour 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter, melted 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1
The text as printed is a scrambled two-column ad recipe: the ingredient list has been broken up and the mixing method dropped altogether. The quantities and the baking directions survive, so the roll is recoverable, but you are supplying the procedure yourself.
- What is missingThere is no mixing instruction at all. A plausible reconstruction, following the straight-dough method usual in booklets of this kind, is: dissolve the yeast in the cooled scalded milk with the sugar, add the salt, melted fat and beaten egg white, work in the flour, knead until smooth, and let it rise in the bowl before shaping. Only then does the printed direction about greased pans apply.
- One cake of yeastA Fleischmann's cake was compressed fresh yeast, about 0.6 oz. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons (one envelope) of active dry or instant yeast. Fresh cake yeast of this size is still sold in some markets but is not interchangeable by weight with dry.
- Scalded and cooled milkScalding killed bacteria in unpasteurised milk and denatured whey proteins that would otherwise slacken the dough. With pasteurised milk it is optional; warm it to about 110F and proceed. Milk much above 120F begins to damage the yeast, and around 140F will kill it.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; by the period's conventional tables a "hot oven" is roughly 400-450F. Ten minutes is realistic for small rolls set an inch apart, but check at eight; these are lean rolls with very little sugar and they colour fast.
- Lard or butterTwo tablespoons in three cups of flour makes a modestly enriched dough, closer to a soft dinner roll than a brioche. Lard gives a shorter, more tender crumb; butter gives flavour. Either can be used measure for measure, though butter carries water as well as fat.
- Egg white onlyNo yolk is called for, which keeps the crumb pale rather than rich and yellow; the recipe does not say why. Nor does it say how to handle the white: beat it before folding it in, or simply whisk it into the milk for a plainer roll.
- The three-quarter hour riseThat timing assumes a warm kitchen and a vigorous fresh cake. In a modern 68-70F room the shaped rolls may want an hour or more. Judge by the dough, not the clock: it should look puffed and hold a light fingerprint.
- YieldThree cups of flour gives roughly 16 to 18 small rolls, or a dozen larger ones.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1890s through the 1920s: the recipe booklet given away by a manufacturer to promote its product. The capitalised FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST in the middle of the ingredient list is the whole point of the page. The Fleischmann brothers are generally credited with popularising compressed fresh yeast in the United States after showing it at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and their foil-wrapped cakes came to displace the homemade hop-and-potato yeasts and salt-rising starters that filled earlier American cookbooks. A recipe like this one is short precisely because reliable yeast had made bread predictable; the older books needed pages of hedging about whether the ferment was alive. The scrambled state of the text here may reflect the original's narrow advertising columns, which digitisation tends to shuffle.