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Vienna Rolls
Have ready in a bowl a table-spoon of butter or lard, made soft by warming a little, and stirring with a spoon. Add to one quart of unsifted flour two heaping tea-spoons baking powder; mix and sift thoroughly together, and place in a bowl with butter. Take more or less sweet milk as may be necessary to form a dough of usual stiffness, according to the flour (about three-fourths of a pint), put into the milk half a tea-spoon of salt, and then stir it into the flour, etc., with a spoon, forming the dough, which turn out on a board and knead sufficiently to make smooth. Roll out half an inch thick, and cut with a large round cutter; rola each one over τo rorm a half round, wetting a little between the folds to make them stick together; place on buttered pans, SO as not to touch, wash over on top with milk to give them a gloss, and bake immediately in a hot oven about twenty minutes. It will do them no harm to stand half an hour before baking, if it is desired.
A quick baking-powder dough shaped like a Parker House roll — no yeast, no rising time, on the table in half an hour. The measurements are by volume in the old style, so a little judgment is needed with the liquid.
- Flour by volumeA quart of unsifted flour is 4 cups, roughly 500 g of all-purpose. The recipe has you add the baking powder before sifting, which distributes it — worth keeping rather than dumping the powder on top of measured flour.
- The milk is a range, not a ruleThree-quarters of a pint is 1½ cups, but the text says plainly "more or less as may be necessary." Flour absorbency varies, so start with 1¼ cups and add the rest by feel to get a soft, barely tacky dough.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished from the buttermilk and clabbered milk also used in period kitchens, which would call for soda rather than baking powder.
- A hot oven425–450°F. These are meant to spring fast; a moderate oven will dry them out over the twenty minutes given.
- Knead lightly"Knead sufficiently to make smooth" means a few light folds, not bread kneading. Overworking a chemically leavened dough makes the rolls tough.
- The foldThe garbled line is "roll each one over to form a half round" — fold the disc in half, moistening between the layers so they stick together, as the recipe directs.
- Baking powder strengthTwo heaping teaspoons to a quart of flour suited the single-acting powders of the period. Modern double-acting powder is slower to act, so the recipe's note that the rolls may stand half an hour before baking still holds.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only a "large round cutter"; expect roughly 16 to 18 rolls. Best within an hour of baking; quick-bread rolls stale faster than yeast ones.
The name is aspirational rather than Austrian. Vienna bread — made with high-quality Hungarian roller-milled flour, milk, and steam-injected ovens — became a byword for fine baking in the English-speaking world after the Vienna Bakery and the widely admired Austrian bread displays at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. American cookbooks of the following decades attached "Vienna" to any roll that was pale, glossy, and enriched with milk, and the milk wash here is doing exactly that work: buying the gloss of a steam oven with a pastry brush. Breakfast and tea cakes were expected to be made and eaten the same morning, and the chemical leavens that spread through American kitchens after the Civil War made a hot roll possible without setting a sponge the night before.