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Finger Rolls
Use recipe for Pocketbook Rolls, but shape into long narrow pieces, brush with melted butter or egg, and serve as a dinner roll.
This is a shaping variation rather than a standalone formula, so the whole of it depends on the Pocketbook Roll dough elsewhere in the book — an enriched white yeast dough with milk, butter, sugar and a little egg. What follows is what the original leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: shape tight, not longFinger rolls hold their shape only if each piece is rolled up under tension, like a tiny baguette, and the seam pinched closed. A loosely stretched rope of dough spreads flat in the oven and bakes into a breadstick rather than a roll.
- Size and spacingDivide the dough into pieces of about 1 1/2 oz (45 g) and roll each into a cylinder 4 to 5 inches long, tapered slightly at the ends. Set them on the pan about an inch apart if you want crisp sides all round, or nearly touching if you want them to knit into a soft-sided batch.
- Butter or egg is not the same choiceMelted butter brushed on before baking gives a soft, pale, matte crust; egg — one yolk beaten with a tablespoon of milk or water — gives the glossy brown finish usually meant by "dinner roll." Butter can also go on the moment they leave the oven, which is the more useful time for it.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no oven instruction here. Small enriched rolls want a hot oven, 400-425F, for 12 to 15 minutes; they are done when the bottoms are firm and the internal temperature reaches about 190F.
- Second riseLet the shaped rolls prove until nearly doubled and visibly puffed, roughly 30 to 45 minutes in a warm room. Slender shapes prove faster than round ones and go over the top easily, at which point they collapse into flat ovals.
- YieldAt this size the dough will give roughly two dozen finger rolls. Shaped rolls can be frozen before their second rise, or baked and refreshed briefly in a hot oven.
Finger rolls belong to the era when a dinner table was judged partly on the variety of its bread basket, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s routinely gave a single yeast dough followed by a string of shapes derived from it — pocketbook (a round folded over on itself, the name often said to come from the clasp purse), clover leaf, Parker House, twist, finger. The Butterick Cook Book, published by the pattern company in 1911, was aimed squarely at the middle-class housekeeper managing a household without a professional cook, and this economy of instruction is characteristic: master one enriched dough, then vary the hand work. The narrow soft roll survives today mostly in the American hot dog bun and in the sandwich rolls of Northeastern bakeries, both made from a similar enriched, milk-and-butter yeast dough.