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Milk Rolls
Scald one-half pint of milk without allowing it to boil, then let it cool, and when cold, stir into it one-fourth pound of flour and one tablespoonful of sugar mixed with two tablespoonfuls of yeast. Put three-fourths of a pound of flour and a very little salt into a basin, make a hollow in the center, and pour in the mixture. Cover, and let it stand in a moderately-warm place all night. The next day, work in one ounce of warm butter, and allow it to stand for six hours in a warm place. Form the dough into oblong rolls, lay them in a baking-tin far enough apart so they will not run together, and let them stand for three hours longer, then bake them in a quick oven, and glaze with the white of an egg.
Tea or Breakfast Rolls Sift out a pound of flour on a table and rub into it four ounces of butter; make a hollow in the center, work in one egg and a tablespoonful of yeast dissolved in a little warmed milk; set to rise in a warm place. Then form a light dough and let it rise once again, in front of the fire; shape into rolls, place in front of the fire again for ten minutes or so, brush them over with egg, and bake in a moderate oven for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Two overnight-sponge roll recipes from the Waldorf's bread station, written when yeast came wet by the cake or as liquid barm and rising times were measured against a coal range. Weigh the flour rather than scooping it; the whole balance of both doughs depends on it.
- The yeast is the ambiguity"Two tablespoonfuls of yeast" means compressed cake yeast crumbled, or liquid brewer's barm, not modern granulated yeast, and it is not safely convertible. A sponge of this size would take roughly a 0.6 oz cake of fresh yeast, or about 2 teaspoons of instant, but treat that as a judgement call rather than a conversion.
- Weights and volumesHalf a pint of milk is one cup. A quarter pound of flour is about 115 g, a scant cup; three-quarters of a pound is about 340 g, near three cups. The second recipe's pound of flour is about 450 g with 4 oz (115 g) butter rubbed in — a rich, short dough, well above a plain dinner roll though a long way short of a true brioche.
- Oven temperaturesA quick oven for the milk rolls is 425–450F. The moderate oven in the tea rolls is 350F, and fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat is right for rolls of two or three ounces each.
- Why the milk is scaldedWith raw milk, scalding guarded against souring organisms and against whatever in the milk slackened the dough; the usual modern explanation points to denaturing a whey protein rather than to enzymes as such. Pasteurized milk needs neither, though scalding to about 180F and cooling still gives a softer crumb. Cooling fully before the yeast goes in is not optional — the recipe is explicit that the milk must be cold.
- The rising times are for a cold kitchenThe rising times are long -- All night, then six hours, then three more points to a cool kitchen and a sluggish barm rather than to any stated temperature. In a 70F kitchen with modern yeast the sponge should be ready in eight to ten hours, the buttered dough in one to two, and the shaped rolls in forty-five minutes to an hour. Judge by the dough — roughly doubled, slow to spring back — not the clock.
- "In front of the fire"The tea rolls are proofed by radiant heat from whatever fire the kitchen had: a warm, dry, one-sided heat of perhaps 80–85F. A turned-off oven with the light on, or a covered bowl on the counter, does the same job without crusting one face of the dough.
- The glazes differThe milk rolls take egg white, the instruction placed after the baking direction, though the text does not make clear whether it goes on before, during or after the bake. The tea rolls are unambiguously brushed with whole egg before baking, giving colour as well as gloss. Do not swap them without expecting a different finish.
- YieldWorking from a pound of flour in each, the milk rolls should give somewhere around a dozen oblong rolls of about 2 oz; the tea rolls, being richer, perhaps ten. Neither recipe states a yield. Both are best within hours of baking — the enriched dough stales fast.
Oscar Tschirky's collection appeared in 1896 under the Waldorf's name, and the bread pages read like formulas for a hotel that baked its own rolls in quantity — though the book is known to have drawn on printed sources as well as on the house kitchens, and these two recipes read as English in idiom. Both are sponge-and-dough methods, long a standard professional approach, in which a slack batter of flour, milk and barm is left to ferment overnight and only then enriched with butter and shaped. A long, cool fermentation suited yeast that could be variable in strength, whether barm from a brewery or compressed cake yeast, which was already widely sold in America by this date. The distinction between plain milk rolls and "tea or breakfast rolls" with four ounces of butter to the pound of flour is the familiar division between everyday bread and a richer dough for the morning table.