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Winter Rolls
Put three quarts of flour into a large crock or jar, scald one quart of buttermilk, add one cup of lard, and pour all over the flour, beating it up well; then add one quart of cold water, stir and add one-half cup of potato yeast, or one cup of brewer's; beat in well and set in a warm place to rise over night. In the morning add salt and flour enough to make a moderately stiff dough; set in a warm place to rise, and, when risen, knead down and set to rise again. This time knead down and place in a large stone crock or bowl, covered tightly with a tin pan to prevent the surface from drying, and set away in a cool place. When needed, turn out on a bread-board, cut off a piece as large as you wish to use, roll out to the thickness of ordinary soda biscuit, cut, and put in the oven to bake immediately. Set away the rest of the dough as before, and it will keep a week in winter, and is very convenient for hot breakfast-rolls.- Mrs. D. Buxton.
A keeping dough rather than a single bake: one large mixing yields a week of morning rolls, provided it stays genuinely cold. Two things need translating for a modern kitchen — the yeast and the cold place.
- Scale it downThree quarts of flour is roughly 12 to 13 cups, on the order of 3 to 3.5 lb, with a quart of buttermilk and a quart of water on top of it, and more flour worked in the next morning. This is a batch for a household with a wood range and a cellar; a quarter of it is a reasonable trial.
- Potato yeast and brewer's yeastBoth were living homemade or brewery-sourced ferments, much weaker and wetter than modern yeast. For half a cup of potato yeast or one cup of brewer's, about 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast will carry a batch this size overnight; the long cool rise does most of the work regardless.
- Scalding the buttermilkScalded milk was standard to kill wild organisms and enzymes that slackened the dough. It also curdles buttermilk, which is expected — the curds break up in the beating. The quart of cold water that follows is what cools the mixture; check it is no hotter than blood heat before the yeast goes in, or the yeast dies.
- The lardOne cup of lard in this quantity of flour gives a soft, tender roll that stays edible cold. Butter or shortening works; the dough will be slightly less tender and will brown a little faster.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the dough went into whatever the range was doing. Rolls of soda-biscuit thickness want a hot oven, 425F, for 12 to 15 minutes.
- "A cool place"This means an unheated pantry or cellar in winter, around 40 to 50F. The refrigerator is the modern equivalent and is safer; the dough will keep about a week there, rising slowly and going progressively more sour.
- Cover it properlyThe tin pan over the crock was there to stop a skin forming. Plastic wrap pressed to the surface or a lidded container does the same thing, and a crust of dried dough will otherwise streak through the rolls.
- Bake immediately after cuttingThe instruction is explicit in the recipe, though no reason is given. The likely one is that the cold dough carries enough gas to spring in the oven, and that cut rolls left standing on the board slacken and spread.
- YieldThe full batch makes on the order of six dozen rolls across the week, depending on how thick they are rolled and how large the cutter.
Doughs like this one — mixed once, held cold, and cut from over several days — were the nineteenth-century answer to daily bread-making in a house without refrigeration, and the name says plainly when they worked: only in winter would a pantry hold a lard-and-buttermilk dough for a week without souring past use. The reliance on potato yeast or brewer's yeast suggests, though it cannot establish, a kitchen in which a cook either kept her own ferment going in a jar or begged a cup from a brewery — a practice many cooks continued well after compressed yeast cakes came on the market. Mrs. Buxton's closing note — "very convenient for hot breakfast-rolls" — is the whole argument for the method: hot bread at breakfast without lighting into a full mixing before dawn.