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Parker House Rolls
Rub one-half table-spoon of butter, and one-half table-spoon of lard into two quarts of sifted flour; into a well in the middle pour one pint of cold boiled milk, and add one-half cup of yeast, one-half cup of sugar, and a little salt. If wanted for tea, rub the flour and butter, and boil the milk, and cool it the night before; add sugar, yeast and salt, and turn all into the flour, but do not stir. Let stand over night; in the morning stir up, knead, and let rise till near tea-time; mold and let rise again, and bake quickly. To mold, cut with cake-cutter; put a little melted butter on one-half and lap nearly over on the other half. Place them in the pan about three-quarters of an inch apart. - Mrs. V. G. Hush, Minneapolis, Minn.
A straightforward overnight roll dough, but two things in it are not what a modern cook expects: the yeast is a liquid, and the butter is mostly in the fold rather than the dough.
- The hinge: butter in the creaseThe dough itself carries almost no fat — half a tablespoon each of butter and lard in eight cups of flour. What makes these rolls is the melted butter brushed on the round before it is folded, which keeps the seam from sealing and gives the split, pull-apart interior. The recipe asks for only a little; do not press the fold shut.
- Half a cup of yeastThis means liquid yeast — homemade barm or a wet bakers' yeast, not a dry granule. Substitute about one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast, and account for the half cup of lost liquid by adding a little more milk.
- Two quarts of flourFlour was measured by volume: roughly 8 cups, about 2 lb. With a pint of milk that is a stiff ratio by modern standards, so expect to hold back some flour or add milk until the dough is soft and slightly tacky.
- Cold boiled milkMilk was routinely scalded before use in bread dough. Modern bakers explain this as deactivating enzymes and whey proteins that slacken dough; the period reason may simply have been the keeping quality and safety of raw milk. Pasteurized milk needs no boiling — just warm it to blood heat, or use it cool and let the dough take longer.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe gives no oven temperature; "bake quickly" points to a hot oven, roughly 400 to 425F. Small rolls of this size want 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and the seams are just set.
- Ignore the clock, watch the doughThe overnight-to-teatime schedule assumes a weak wild yeast and a cool kitchen. Modern yeast in a heated house will run through the same dough in a few hours; judge by doubling in bulk, not by the hour of day.
- Shaping and spacingCut rounds with a 2 1/2 to 3 inch cutter, butter, fold nearly in half, and set them three-quarters of an inch apart as directed — they should just touch as they proof, so they rise upward and stay soft on the sides.
- YieldThe full quantity gives about two and a half to three dozen rolls. Halve it for an ordinary household; the dough also keeps a day in the refrigerator after the first rise.
The roll takes its name from the Parker House hotel in Boston, which opened in 1855 and whose dining room made the folded, butter-creased roll famous; the invention is generally traced to a cook there, though the various stories about who and why are traditional rather than documented. By the 1870s and 1880s the shape had escaped the hotel entirely and turned up in community cookbooks all over the country, usually as somebody's contributed version rather than a copied original — which is exactly what this one is, credited to Mrs. V. G. Hush of Minneapolis. The instructions read the way a cook writes for another cook who already knows the work: no oven temperature, no timing, and the whole schedule pinned to when tea will be served.