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Breakfast Rolls
Mix the dough in the evening, according to directions in the recipe for Bread Raised Once;" add a table-spoon of butter, and set where it will be a little warm until morning; cut off pieces, and carefully shape them into rolls of the desired size by rolling them between the hands, but do not knead them; dip the sides of each into drawn butter when they are shaped, and place them in the baking-pan (the butter prevents their sticking together when baked, and they will be smooth and perfect when separated). Rub them over the top with drawn butter, and dust a little fine salt over the top; set in a warm place, and they will quickly rise ready for baking. These are delicious.
This is a shaping-and-finishing method rather than a full recipe: it depends on a plain white bread dough made elsewhere in the book, and it gives no oven heat or time at all. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- The dough it depends on"Bread Raised Once" is the book's plain white yeast dough, and the name implies a single rise rather than two. Any lean white bread dough will serve; working from about 4 cups of flour is a convenient modern quantity. The tablespoon of butter added here makes it a slightly enriched roll dough.
- Drawn butterIn nineteenth-century usage the term often means a flour-thickened melted-butter sauce, but here it plainly means melted butter. If you like, melt it and let it stand so you can use the clear fat and leave the milky sediment behind; it browns less in the oven.
- The overnight rise"a little warm" means somewhere gently warm rather than hot; in a coal-range kitchen that would be near, not on, the range. Ordinary modern room temperature suits it. A refrigerated overnight rise is an alternative that gives more control, with an hour or two of warming before shaping.
- Do not kneadThis is the hinge. The dough has already had its rise, and rolling each piece between the palms just tightens the surface enough to hold a round shape. Working it further drives out the gas and gives you a dense, tight crumb instead of the open one the recipe is after.
- Buttering the sidesThe recipe states the purpose itself: the butter keeps the rolls from sticking where they touch, so they separate cleanly and smooth. Set them close enough that they will meet as they prove.
- Oven heatSmall rolls want a hot oven: 400–425F. Fifteen to twenty minutes is usual for rolls of about two ounces each, until they are well browned on top and sound hollow underneath.
- The second rise"They will quickly rise ready for baking" means 30–45 minutes at room temperature, until nearly doubled and slack to a fingertip. Because the dough is already mature, it moves faster than a first rise and will over-prove if left too long.
- YieldIf you build the dough on about 4 cups of flour, expect somewhere in the region of a dozen to sixteen rolls of dinner-roll size.
Breakfast rolls of this kind belong to the era when a household kept bread dough working more or less continuously, and the cook's skill lay in deciding what to make from the batch in hand. Mixing the dough at night so it could be shaped at first light suited a kitchen where hot bread was expected at breakfast rather than baked the day before. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) shares much of its content with the widely circulated Buckeye Cookery, both compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox, and it shares that book's habit of cross-referencing -- a recipe like this one is an instruction for varying a master dough, not a stand-alone formula. The trick of buttering the sides of rolls set close in a pan long predates the book and is still standard practice; it is why pull-apart rolls have soft, pale flanks and a browned top.