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French Rolls
Mrs. Thos. Orton.
Take one-half cup of yeast, rub a small one-half cup of butter in the flour (you will have to guess the quantity), then add the yeast, and water enough to wet; mix as for soda biscuit. Let it rise till morning. Roll in thin sheets, and cut into squares, spread a very little butter on each, and sprinkle a little flour on to roll up Put in the pan when light, bake twenty minutes. Nice.
A sparse overnight roll formula of the kind written down between cooks who already knew the dough. The two things it leaves out entirely are the flour quantity and the oven, so both need settling before you start.
- "One-half cup of yeast"This is liquid yeast — homemade potato or hop barm, or brewer's barm from the local brewery — not granulated yeast, which did not yet exist in this form. Half a cup of barm corresponds roughly to a scant teaspoon of instant dry yeast plus the half cup of liquid it was carrying.
- Guessing the flourThe instruction to guess is honest, but for a half-cup of butter and enough water to wet it you are looking at roughly 3 to 4 cups of flour, added until the dough clears the bowl. "Mix as for soda biscuit" means a soft, barely-kneaded dough, not a smooth bread dough.
- SaltNone is called for. Modern unsalted butter and modern flour want about 1½ teaspoons of salt for this quantity or the rolls taste flat.
- Let it rise till morningAn overnight rise in a cool nineteenth-century kitchen is perhaps 12 hours at 60F. A modern room at 70F will overproof the dough in that time; the refrigerator is the closer equivalent.
- The butter-and-flour layeringSpreading a little butter and dusting flour before rolling up is a rough lamination — it makes the baked roll pull apart in leaves. The flour matters as much as the butter; without it the layers weld together.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Rolls of this size and richness suit 400 to 425F for the twenty minutes stated. Below that they dry out before they colour.
- "When light"The shaped rolls go in after a second rise, when they are visibly puffed and a fingertip dent springs back slowly. This is typically 45 minutes to an hour from cold overnight dough.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 rolls from three to four cups of flour, depending on how large you cut the squares.
"French rolls" in American community cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s often meant nothing Parisian; the name tended to mark a roll enriched with butter and rolled or folded rather than the plain risen bread of everyday baking. This is a contributed recipe of the kind signed by its donor -- Mrs. Thos. Orton here, identified by her husband's name in the convention of the day -- and the terseness is characteristic: the flour quantity is left to the cook and the oven is not mentioned at all. The final "Nice" is the whole of the review.