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Parker House Rolls
For eighteen good-sized rolls allow two scanty quarts of flour; one pint of milk; two teaspoons of salt; two tablespoons of sugar; two tablespoons of butter or lard; one-half cup of yeast, or one-half cake of compressed yeast. Boil the milk, and set it to cool. Sift the flour into a mixing-bowl, rub the butter, sugar and salt into it, make a well in the center and turn into it the cold milk and the yeast cake dissolved in a little water. Sprinkle the top of the milk with a little of the flour, cover the bowl, and leave until morning. In the morning mix the mass together with a spoon, then knead the dough for twenty minutes, return it to the bowl, cover and set it to rise in a warm place. When it has become three times as large as at first (generally in about three hours), turn it out on the bread board, and roll it to a thickness of one-half an inch. Cut the dough with a round cutter, place a round stick the size of a slate-pencil on a roll about one-third its width from one side, press with the stick until the dough under it is about one-half as thick as it was before, and fold the shorter side of the roll over; repeat this process with each roll. Half a teaspoon of butter may be spread between the folds of each roll, if liked. Place the rolls in buttered pans, cover with a cloth, and let them rise one and one-half hour; they should then be more then double their original size. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. In making the rolls be careful not to mix the flour with the yeast and milk until the latter have stood several hours. BRIOCHE-Dissolve one cake of compressed yeast in three tablespoons of lukewarm water. Stir till thoroughly mixed, then add enough flour to make a soft, pasty ball. Drop this ball into a pan of warm water (not hot water for that would stop fermentation). Cover the pan and set it in a warm place for about an hour, when the ball will be found on the surface of the water. Put a scant quart of flour into a bowl; make a well in the center, into which break four eggs whole, two teaspooons of sugar, onehalf teaspoon of salt, and three-quarters of a pound of soft butter. Work these together with the hand, gradually mixing in the surrounding flour and adding two more eggs, one at a time. Mix and beat for quite a long time until the dough entirely loses its stickiness. Take the leavening ball from the water with a skimmer, and work thoroughly into the mass, adding the seventh and last egg. Work and beat for a very long time, so that the texture of the dough will be very fine. Put the dough in a bowl with a cover and let it rise till double its size; this will take from four to five hours. Beat it down again, and place it in the ice-box at least twelve hours, or better, over night.
The paste must be handled quickly and lightly, when taken from the ice, as it softens if it becomes warm.
Form into small balls, glaze with egg, and bake about twenty minutes.
This noted French preparation is used in many ways. It may be served with coffee or tea, or as a dessert, with rum sauce, it goes by the name of "Baba au Rhum."
There are several ways of shaping it, besides the ones given; perhaps the ring and the twist are the best known.
Two recipes sit on this page: an overnight Parker House roll dough and a classic French brioche built on a floating leaven. Both are workable today once the yeast quantities and oven language are translated.
- Flour quantity"Two scanty quarts" is a volume measure of unsifted-then-sifted flour, roughly 7 to 8 cups, about 2 pounds or 900 g. Because it is sifted into the bowl, it is lighter than a modern scooped cup; work by feel and hold back the last cup until the dough comes together.
- Yeast"One-half cup of yeast" means homemade liquid or potato yeast, rarely encountered in a domestic kitchen today. Half a compressed cake of the period is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 oz fresh yeast, or about 1 teaspoon of instant dry yeast for the rolls. It is a small amount, suited to the slow overnight rise the recipe calls for.
- Why the milk is boiled and cooledScalding raw milk was held to destroy something in it that slackened bread dough; the effect is usually attributed now to whey proteins rather than enzymes. With pasteurized milk the step is unnecessary, but the milk must still be fully cold when it meets the yeast, which is the real point of the warning at the end of the paragraph.
- The overnight restThe instruction not to mix the flour into the yeast and milk until they have stood several hours creates a loose ferment under a flour blanket. Cracks in that flour surface tell you fermentation is under way. Expect the dough to be slack in the morning.
- Kneading timeTwenty minutes by hand is right for this enriched dough. In a stand mixer with a dough hook, 8 to 10 minutes on medium-low reaches the same windowpane.
- The slate-pencil stickA slate pencil was about 1/4 inch thick. Use a thin dowel, a chopstick or the back of a knife to press the crease that lets the folded roll open along a seam as it bakes.
- OvenThe book says only "a hot oven," which in period usage means roughly 400 to 450F (200 to 230C); twenty minutes in the middle of that range will give a deep gold top. No temperature is given for the brioche; 375 to 400F (190 to 200C) suits the very high butter content, so it sets before the crust darkens.
- The brioche leavenThe floating ball is the old levain flottant: a stiff yeast sponge that rises to the surface of warm water when ready, about an hour. A cake of compressed yeast is roughly 2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast.
- Brioche proportionsThree-quarters of a pound of butter and seven eggs to a scant quart of flour is a full-fat brioche, close to the modern brioche riche. The butter must be soft but not melted, and the overnight chill is not optional: warm brioche dough cannot be shaped.
- YieldThe roll dough gives the stated eighteen good-sized rolls. The recipe gives no count for the brioche; a batch of this size will make roughly eighteen to twenty small balls.
Parker House rolls take their name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, opened in 1855 and long famous for its bread; the folded, seam-split roll is generally traced to its kitchens in the 1870s, with the usual apocryphal story of an angry baker flinging half-shaped dough into the oven. By the time this page appeared, the roll had become a fixture of American hotel and home baking, and its overnight sponge belongs to an era when yeast was slow, variable and often homemade. The brioche appended here shows the same reaching for French pastry credentials: the floating-leaven method and the long cold rest are straight out of professional French practice, and the closing note that brioche steeped in rum sauce becomes baba au rhum sits at the blurred edge between those two rich doughs.