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French Rolls
Peel six medium-sized mealy potatoes, boil in two quarts of water, press and drain both potatoes and water through a colander; , press and drain both potatoes and water through a colander; when cool enough so as not to scald, add flour to make a thick batter, beat well, and when lukewarm, add one-half cup potato yeast. Make this sponge early in the morning, and when light turn into a bread pan, add a tea-spoon salt, half cup lard, and flour enough for a soft dough; mix up, and set in a warm, even temperature; when risen, knead down and place again to rise, repeating this process five or six times; cut in small pieces and mold on the bread-board in rolls about one inch thick by five long; roll in melted butter or sweet lard, and place in well-greased baking pans (nine inches long by five wide and two and a half in depth, makes a convenient-sized pan, which holds fifteen of these rolls; or, if twice the width, put in two rows); press the rolls closely together, SO that together, so that they will only be about half an inch in width. Let rise a short time and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven; if the top browns too rapidly, cover with paper. These rolls, if properly made, are very white, light and tender.
Or, make rolls larger, and just before putting them in the oven, cut deeply across each one with a sharp knife. This will make the cleft roll, so famous among French cooks.
A potato-water sponge roll from the era before packaged yeast, when a cook kept her own leaven going. The dough is straightforward; the archaic parts are the yeast and the oven.
- Potato yeastA home-cultivated liquid leaven of boiled potato, sugar and flour, kept from batch to batch. Substitute a scant 2 teaspoons instant or active dry yeast, or about a cup of active sourdough starter, and expect a slightly different flavour.
- Mealy potatoesStarchy baking types — russet or Idaho. Six medium ones is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb. The colander step is meant to push the cooked potato through as a purée into its own cooking water, so keep all the water.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400 to 450F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits rolls this size. The paper cover in the original does the job of a foil tent.
- Five or six risingsRepeated knocking down was standard in recipes of this kind, whatever the reason; with modern yeast, two rises — bulk, then a short proof in the pan — will give a light crumb.
- Flour quantityNever stated, and it depends entirely on how much of the potato water is left after boiling. Add it in stages to a soft, slightly tacky dough rather than working to a fixed measure.
- LardHalf a cup of lard is about 4 oz; shortening substitutes directly, butter less exactly, as it carries water. "Sweet lard" simply means fresh and unrancid, not sweetened.
- The pan trickPacking the rolls until they are squeezed to half an inch wide is the whole point — they rise upward against each other and pull apart with soft white sides. A 9x5 pan takes about fifteen; a pan twice as wide takes two rows.
- YieldThe original says only that one 9x5 pan holds fifteen of the small rolls; total yield depends on how much flour the potato water takes up, and the larger cleft rolls will give correspondingly fewer.
Potato-water sponges were standard practice in nineteenth-century American baking: the starch fed the yeast, gave a moister crumb and kept the bread soft for a second day, all of which mattered when a household baked once or twice a week and had no dough conditioners. The "cleft roll" at the end is a slashed dinner roll of the kind French bakers cut to control the break of the crust, and the appeal to French practice was a common badge of refinement in American cookbooks of the 1880s — The Dixie Cook Book, like its northern cousins in the Buckeye family of compilations, was assembled from contributed household recipes and leaned on such attributions to signal that a plain potato roll could be company fare. The doubled and garbled phrases in the text ("press and drain" twice over) look like duplications introduced in transcription.