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Butter Rolls for Tea
Put half a pound of light bread dough into a basin, mix in a little sugar, a lump of butter, the yolk of an egg and half a teacupful of cream, together with some flour. Let it rise in a warm temperature for a couple of hours, then knead well on a floured table for several minutes until the dough is full of air bubbles and of a light and silky appearance. Make into round balls, and when all are finished, lay them flat, brush half of them with melted butter, and put the other half on top, press in the center, and brush over the surfaces with melted butter, setting them one side to rise again. Then put them in a moderate oven, and bake them for fifteen or twenty minutes; take out, cut into halves, butter them inside, and serve hot.
A working note rather than a full formula: it assumes you already have bread dough on hand and enriches a piece of it for the tea table. Read the quantities as proportions and adjust to feel.
- "Light bread dough"This means ordinary yeasted white bread dough that has already had one rise, not a batter or a starter. Half a pound is roughly a cupful of risen dough, a modest fraction of a typical loaf's worth.
- Vague measuresA "lump of butter" and "a little sugar" were left to the cook's judgement; something on the order of an ounce of butter and a spoonful of sugar suits the quantity of dough. The extra flour is simply enough to bring the softened, enriched dough back to a kneadable state.
- Half a teacupful of creamTeacups of the period were smaller than a modern mug and varied; contemporary cookery usage puts one somewhere around 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a cupful is a few tablespoons at most. Add it gradually; the dough will slacken badly if it all goes in at once.
- Why the two-hour riseButter, sugar, yolk and cream all slow yeast down. The dough should roughly double rather than run to the clock, and it will take longer in a cool room.
- Kneading to "silky"This is the hinge. The enrichments have to be fully worked in or the rolls bake up streaky and dense; knead until the dough is smooth and springs back, 8 to 10 minutes by hand.
- The stacked roundsTwo buttered discs pressed together bake into a roll that tends to part at the butter seam, which likely explains why the recipe finishes by cutting them into halves. Press firmly at the center or the halves separate in the oven.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Enriched dough browns quickly from the sugar and yolk, so check toward the lower end of the fifteen to twenty minutes given.
- Second rise"Setting them one side to rise again" means until visibly puffed and slow to spring back when pressed, usually 30 to 45 minutes in a warm kitchen.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Half a pound of dough plus the additions, made up as stacked pairs, will produce only a handful of small rolls.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the era when afternoon tea at a great hotel meant a plate of small hot breads. The recipe begins from an ordinary lean dough enriched with butter, egg and cream. The stacking of two buttered rounds so the finished roll splits along a seam is the same idea as the Parker House roll, generally traced to the Parker House hotel in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century, where a folded, buttered round became the hotel's signature bread. That American hotels borrowed such tricks from one another freely is part of what makes a book like Oscar's useful: it records the working habits of a professional kitchen rather than a household's set-piece recipes.