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Long Breakfast Rolls
Three and one-half cups sweet milk, one cup butter and lard mixed in equal proportions, one cup potato yeast, flour enough to make into dough. Let rise over night; in the morning add one beaten egg. Knead thoroughly, and let rise again. With the hands, make into balls as large as a small hen's egg; then roll between the hands to make long rolls (about three inches), place close together in even rows in the pans. Let rise until light, and bake delicately
A sponge-and-dough roll built on a homemade potato starter, written for a cook who already knew what "flour enough" and "bake delicately" meant. The two things to settle before starting are the leavening and the flour quantity.
- Potato yeastThis is a homemade starter of mashed potato, sugar and flour left to ferment, and it is both leavening and liquid. Substituting about 2 1/4 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast works, but cut the milk back by roughly three-quarters of a cup to compensate for what the starter would have contributed.
- Flour enoughWith 3 1/2 cups of milk plus the starter, expect a great deal of flour, likely somewhere in the range of 9 to 12 cups of all-purpose. Add it until the dough clears the bowl and is soft rather than stiff; enriched doughs like this one should stay slightly tacky.
- Scale of the batchThis is a very large quantity by modern standards, roughly four to five dozen rolls. Halving it is straightforward, and the single egg divides awkwardly, so beat one egg and use half by weight.
- The fatOne cup of butter and lard mixed means half a cup of each. All butter works and gives better flavor; all shortening gives a softer, blander crumb. Melt and cool it, or cream it in, rather than adding it cold in lumps.
- The overnight riseThe original assumes a cool nineteenth-century kitchen. In a modern house at 70F a full overnight rise will overferment and go sour; refrigerate the dough after mixing and let it come back to room temperature in the morning.
- ShapingA ball the size of a small hen's egg is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 ounces of dough. Rolled to three inches and set close together in the pan, they rise into one another and stay soft on the sides.
- Oven"Bake delicately" points to a moderate oven and a pale finish rather than a deep crust; something in the region of 350F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are just barely colored, suits the instruction. The book gives no temperature.
- Final rise"Let rise until light" means until the rolls have roughly doubled and a fingertip dent springs back slowly. Underproofed rolls of this size bake up dense and heavy.
Before packaged yeast was reliably available, many American households kept a liquid starter going, and potato yeast was one of the common forms: boiled potato and its water, sugar, and flour, refreshed periodically and kept in a jar in a cool place. Compiled cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, of which The Dixie Cook Book is one, commonly print one or more potato yeast formulas near the bread chapter, since the bread recipes depend on having a starter to hand. The long, close-packed roll here belongs to the American breakfast-and-tea-cake tradition rather than to any single regional dish: rich with butter, lard and egg, baked pale, and served warm at a meal where hot breads were the expectation. Over the following decades compressed yeast cakes sold by the grocer largely displaced the household starter, and recipes like this one stopped making sense as written.