Home › Breakfast And Tea Cakes › Coffee Rolls
Coffee Rolls
Work into a quart of bread dough a rounded table-spoon of butter, and a half tea-cup of white sugar; add some dried currants well washed and dried in the oven), sift some flour and sugar over them, work into the other ingredients, make into small rolls, dip into melted butter, place in tins, let rise a short time, and bake.
A sweetened enrichment of ordinary bread dough, of the sort that assumes you already have dough rising for the day's loaves. The instructions are skeletal, so the quantities and the oven need pinning down.
- A quart of bread doughThe recipe measures dough by bulk, in a quart measure, rather than by weight. Reckon on roughly a pound to a pound and a half of risen white bread dough, depending on how far it has risen -- the amount from about 3 cups of flour. Any lean yeast dough works; a store-bought pound of pizza dough is close enough.
- Half a tea-cup of sugarA period teacup is reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces rather than a full measuring cup, so read this as roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons. That is a modestly sweet roll, not a pastry.
- Dried currantsThese are Zante currants, small dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants and not raisins. Half a cup to a cup suits this quantity of dough.
- Drying them in the ovenThe washing removes packing grit and the brief oven drying keeps surface water from slackening the dough. A few minutes in a low oven, or a good blot with a towel, does the job.
- Flour and sugar sifted over the fruitThis is the hinge. Coating damp currants in flour keeps them from clumping and sinking, and lets them disperse when worked into the already-developed dough. Work the fruit in with a light hand; overworking risen dough tears the gluten and the rolls bake dense.
- Dipping in melted butterThe rolls are dipped whole before going into the tin. The recipe does not say how closely they are set; if they are placed touching, the butter keeps them from knitting into a single mass and gives a pull-apart edge.
- Let rise a short timeBecause the dough is already fermented, this is a second short proof: 20 to 30 minutes in a warm kitchen, until the rolls look puffed. A cold kitchen will want longer, and the added fat will slow things somewhat.
- BakeNo temperature is given, and the recipe offers no oven term to translate; cooks judged the oven by hand and habit. A hot oven, around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, suits sweetened rolls of this size; the sugar browns faster than plain bread, so check early.
- YieldA dozen to eighteen small rolls, depending on how small you make them; a single medium tin will hold them.
"Coffee rolls" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is usually taken to mean rolls to be eaten with coffee rather than rolls containing it, the same sense often said to be preserved in the German Kaffeekuchen and in the coffee cake still sold in bakeries. Recipes of this type appear to belong to a household economy in which bread dough was made in quantity two or three times a week, and a portion was, it seems, often diverted and enriched with butter, sugar and dried fruit for breakfast or the tea table. That practice would explain the recipe's brevity: it presumes the reader has dough at hand and knows her own oven. The Dixie Cook-Book, first issued in the 1880s and reprinted for decades in Atlanta, was assembled from contributed receipts of exactly this kind, and its Breakfast and Tea Cakes chapter is full of small variations on the same trick of turning plain dough into something sweet.