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Maryland Rolls
Rub one-half table-spoon of lard into one quart of flour, make a well in the middle, put in one-half cup baker's yeast—or one cup yeast-or one cup of home-made-two tea-spoons sugar, onehalf pint cold boiled milk; do not stir, but let stand over night; in the morning knead well, after dinner knead again, cut out, put in pans, and let rise until tea time. Bake in a quick oven. -Mrs. Judge W.
A plain overnight sponge dough with almost no fat and no sugar to speak of — closer to a soft dinner roll than a sweet bun. Two things need translating: the yeast and the day's schedule.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of flour is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb or 500 g. Half a pint of milk is 1 cup, and half a tablespoon of lard is about 7 g — a very lean dough.
- "Baker's yeast" versus home-made"Baker's yeast" here means yeast obtained from a baker or brewer rather than raised at home; the half-cup measure suggests a liquid or soft yeast rather than anything like a modern dry one. The alternative, a cup of home-made yeast, would have been a potato or hop barm, and the doubled quantity implies it was reckoned the weaker of the two. About 2 teaspoons of instant dry yeast covers this quantity of flour.
- Cold boiled milkScalding was the usual treatment for raw milk before baking — chiefly to stop it souring the dough, though modern bakers also credit it with deactivating enzymes that slacken gluten. With pasteurised milk you can skip the boiling, but do use it cool, not warm: the recipe specifies cold boiled milk, and the long overnight rise depends on a slow start.
- There is no saltThere is no salt in the list at all — possibly taken as understood by the contributor, though the page does not tell us. Add about 1½ teaspoons; without it the rolls taste flat and the dough ferments faster than you want.
- The schedule, and why to shorten itSponge overnight, knead in the morning, knead again after the midday dinner, shape and prove until tea. That is 18 hours or more, a schedule suited to slower and less predictable yeast. With modern yeast, judge by the dough: an overnight rise in the refrigerator, one knockback and shaping, then a final prove of an hour or two at room temperature until doubled.
- "Do not stir"The yeast, sugar and milk go into a well in the flour and are left alone, so fermentation begins in a wet pocket rather than through the whole mass. Keep it that way — the mixing happens at the morning kneading.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" is usually read as somewhere around 400–450°F. Small rolls of this size take 12–18 minutes; they should sound hollow and be lightly browned rather than deeply crusted.
- YieldAbout 15 to 18 rolls from a quart of flour, depending how large you cut them. Set them close in the pan for soft sides, apart for crisp ones.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the late nineteenth-century genre of compiled community cookbooks, in which recipes arrived from named contributors and were printed largely as submitted — hence the abrupt style, the missing salt, and the signature "Mrs. Judge W.", identifying a woman by her husband's office rather than her own name. The timetable is the real period document: kneading at three separate points between one meal and the next, and the meal names — dinner at midday, tea in the late afternoon — mark the rhythm of the day as much as the dough's progress.