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Italian Rolls
A pound of bread dough. quarter-pound softened butter: work the butter well into the dough, and roll out about half an inch thick; cut into strips nearly an inch wide and seven or eight inches long; sirt over them nne corn meal, place them apart on a buttered pan, and when light bake in a quick oven . - In the Kitchen.
A lean bread dough enriched after the first rise — essentially a quick way to turn ordinary loaf dough into buttery breadsticks. Nothing here is difficult, but the dough's condition at the moment you add the butter decides the result.
- A pound of bread doughRoughly the dough from a small loaf: about 2 cups flour, a scant 3/4 cup water, yeast and salt, after its first rise. A pound of thawed frozen bread dough works as a direct substitute.
- Working in the butterFour ounces of butter into a pound of already-risen dough is a lot, and the dough will slacken and look broken before it comes back together. Have the butter genuinely soft, not melted, and knead until no streaks remain — melted butter will pool and fry the strips instead of enriching them.
- "Quick oven"Conventionally read as roughly 400 to 425F. At that heat the strips will likely take somewhere around 10 to 15 minutes; watch them early, since the butter and the corn meal both colour quickly.
- "When light"The second rise. Enriched dough tends to be slower, so expect it to take appreciably longer than lean dough would. The strips should look puffed and hold a slight dent when pressed.
- "Sift over them fine corn meal"Fine cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind — it is a dusting for texture and a little crunch, not a coating. Sift it over the cut strips just before the final rise.
- ShapingHalf an inch thick, an inch wide, seven or eight inches long gives a substantial stick rather than a grissino. Space them at least an inch apart; they spread as the butter loosens in the oven.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 rolls at the dimensions given. They are best within a few hours of baking.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "Italian" loosely, often for anything long, thin and crusty rather than for a dish with a documented Italian original; these strips sit closer to a home cook's breadstick than to any regional Italian bread. What makes the recipe characteristic of its moment is its economy: it assumes the reader already has bread dough rising in the kitchen, and treats a pound of it as a raw material to be diverted into something else for the tea table. That habit — a single dough doing duty as loaves, rolls, buns and fried cakes across a week — runs through the breakfast and tea cake recipes of the period. The credit line "In the Kitchen" points to another cookbook, the sort of borrowing that was routine and largely unremarked in compiled American cookbooks.